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Dione and the Dark Side

Nov. 9, 2009
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks to the night side of Saturn and its rings for a view that includes Dione. Tiny Pandora is also present outside the F ring in this image taken on Sept. 22, 2009.

The Cassini spacecraft looks to the night side of Saturn and its rings for a view that includes Dione.

Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across) is in the top right of the image. Tiny Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) can also be seen outside the F ring near the center of the image. Dione was overexposed in this image and has been dimmed by a factor of seven.

This view looks toward the sunlit, northern side of the rings from about 12 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 22, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 742 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 72 kilometers (45 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.

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