Skewered Moon

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Caption:

Dione floats in the sea of space, bisected by Saturn's edge-on ringplane.

The Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is visible here. Saturn is just off to the right of the image. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 2, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.5 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Dione. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) 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 .

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