Saturn-lit Surface

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Caption:

This Cassini image shows the night side of Saturn's moon Dione, dimly lit by "Saturnshine": that is, reflected light from the planet lying off to the left in Cassini's field of view when this image was taken. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 118 degrees. The image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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 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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