Streaking Away from Dione
Saturn's crescent moon Dione hangs before the Cassini spacecraft in this magnified image taken on July 19, 2004. The icy moon shows a hint of the bright, wispy features that mark its surface.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a distance of 6.2 million kilometers (3.9 million miles) from Dione, and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase angle, of 96 degrees. The image scale is 37 kilometers (25 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of four to aid visibility.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, 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.