Pocked Moon

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Caption:

Cassini spied a crater-covered Dione in this image from Dec. 8, 2004. The bright, wispy streaks for which Dione is known are located on the moon's night side to the west. The streaky terrain was imaged at very high resolution by Cassini during its flyby of Dione on Dec. 14, 2004. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.

This view shows mostly the trailing hemisphere of Dione. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a distance of 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 58 degrees. North is up. The image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

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