Beyond the Canyons

Bright, wispy-looking fractures reach across the rugged, icy landscape of Dione.

See PIA06163 for a close-up view of Dione's icy canyons.

The medium-sized crater Dido, with its prominent central peak, sits just right of the terminator, below center.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North is toward the top and rotated six degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 21, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 290,000 kilometers (180,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 89 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel.

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 operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.