Above Dione's Fractures

The Cassini spacecraft looks down on the north pole of Dione and the fine fractures that cross its trailing hemisphere.

The north pole of Dione lies on the terminator between shadow and light, about halfway down the left side of the image. This view is centered on terrain at 66 degrees north latitude, 224 degrees west longitude. Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across).

To learn more about Dione's fractures, see PIA09764.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 11, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 429,000 kilometers (267,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 67 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) 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.