High Contrast Crescent

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Caption:

This high-phase view of Dione shows the great contrast between the highly reflective "wisps" and the surrounding terrain.

These wispy linea are geologically young fractures exposing the icy surface of the moon.

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on Dione is up.

The view was acquired from a position 39 degrees south of the moon's equator. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 26, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 789,000 kilometers (490,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 124 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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 .

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