PIA11487: Looking Down on Dione


Looking Down on Dione

Caption:

Craters dot Dione's high northern latitudes, and, farther south, wispy fractures stretch across the moon's equator and mid-latitudes.

To learn more about Dione's wisps, see PIA09764 .

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). The north pole of Dione lies in darkness just to the right of the middle of the terminator. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 29, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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/ . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Dione
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2009-05-07
Date in Caption 2009-03-29
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11487
Identifier PIA11487