World of Canyons

Dione
PIA NumberPIA08998
Language
  • english

Bright lines creep across the face of Dione. The lines are systems of geologically fresh-looking canyons with bright, icy walls.

Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across). North on Dione is up and rotated 18 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 18, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Dione. Image scale is about 15 kilometers (9 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute