Far off Cracks

The distinctive, wispy system of fractures on the trailing hemisphere of Saturn's moon Dione shows a great deal of contrast in this ultraviolet view. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.

North on Dione is up and tilted 30 degrees to the left.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 7, 2005, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two 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 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.