Cracked-up Dione

Bright, icy canyons stretch across the surface of Dione.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across). North is up and rotated 23 degrees to the right. This is a more distant and more southerly view of the terrain seen in PIA09830.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 4, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 306,000 kilometers (190,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 38 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel.

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.