PIA08856: Shadows on Ice


Shadows on Ice

Caption:

Canyons and mountain peaks snake along the terminator on the crater-covered, icy moon Dione. With the Sun at a low angle on their local horizon, the line of mountain ridges above center casts shadows toward the east.

Sunlit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) -- the side that always faces away from Saturn. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 15, 2006 at a distance of approximately 299,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 81 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel.

Background Info:

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Dione Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Planet
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Mountain, Shadow, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2007-01-17
Date in Caption 2006-12-15
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08856
Identifier PIA08856