Streaks on Dione

Oct. 15, 2004

This image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows Dione, a moon of Saturn, exhibit some of the interesting bright and dark markings for which it is renowned.

In this image, Dione, a moon of Saturn, exhibits some of the interesting bright and dark markings for which it is renowned. From Voyager images, Dione is known to have bright wispy markings, some of which may be visible here. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) wide.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Sept. 15, 2004, at a distance of 8.8 million kilometers (5.4 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 83 degrees. The image scale is 53 kilometers (33 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of four and contrast-enhanced 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.

Streaks on Dione

Keep Exploring