As Cassini soared above high northern latitudes on Saturn’s moon Dione, the spacecraft looked down at a region near the day-night boundary. This view shows the region as a contrast-enhanced image in which features in shadow are illuminated by reflected light from Saturn. Inset just above center is a higher resolution view — one of the mission’s highest-resolution views of the Saturnian moon’s icy surface.
Territory seen here is just east of a crater named Butes, near an unnamed tectonic structure around 65 degrees north latitude, 25 degrees west longitude.
The broader view is from the spacecraft’s wide-angle camera (WAC) and includes an inset view from Cassini’s narrow-angle camera (NAC). The NAC view (also available here at its full resolution) shows features about 10 times smaller than the WAC view. The unenhanced WAC view is also provided here.
The views were obtained near the time of Cassini’s closest approach to Dione during the encounter, like PIA19653. Along with a view taken by Cassini in 2005 (see PIA07748), these are the highest resolution images of Dione’s surface acquired by Cassini.
The views were acquired in visible light at an altitude of 365 miles (588 kilometers) above Dione. The wide-angle camera image has an image scale of about 115 feet (35 meters) per pixel; the narrow-angle camera image has an image scale of about 12 feet (3.5 meters) per pixel.
The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and https://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
For Additional images associated with this caption, see NASA’s Photojournal: PIA19654.