CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Dione's Creeping Canyons

Bright fractures creep across the surface of icy Dione. This extensive canyon system is centered on a region of terrain that is significantly darker that the rest of the moon. Part of the darker terrain is visible at right.

Lit terrain in this view is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, 698 miles across). North is up and rotated 8 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately 677,000 kilometers (421,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 62 degrees. Image scale is 4 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: October 23, 2006 (PIA 08293)
Image/Caption Information 		  Dione's Creeping Canyons
PIA 08293
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