NASA's Cassini spacecraft obtained this image of Saturn's moon Dione on Sept. 3, 2010. The camera was pointing toward Dione at approximately 44,173 kilometers (27,448 miles) away.
Cruising past Saturn's moon Dione this past weekend, NASA's Cassini spacecraft got its best look yet at the north polar region of this small, icy moon and returned stark raw images of the fractured, cratered surface.
The new images also show new views of the long, bright canyon ice walls, which scientists working with NASA's Voyager spacecraft called "wispy terrain" in the early 1980s. These ice walls thread along the surface of the moon's trailing hemisphere and cut across craters.
This image was taken on September 03, 2010 and received on Earth September 04, 2010. The camera was pointing toward DIONE at approximately 49,969 kilometers away, and the image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters. It has not been validated or calibrated. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, 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.
More raw images of Dione are available at saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/ .
More information: More information about the Cassini-Huygens mission is at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
Provided by JPL/NASA
