Powerful Impact

Saturn's cratered moon Dione displays a large impact basin near its south pole in this Cassini spacecraft image. The topographic features that extend radially away from the basin could be secondary craters or tectonic grooves related to the impact. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.

This view shows principally the leading hemisphere of Dione. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Nov. 2, 2004, at a distance of 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees. North is up. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.

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 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.