CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Powerful Impact

Powerful Impact
PIA 06545
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   Cratered Dione (1,123 kilometers, 698 miles across) displays a large impact basin near its south pole in this Cassini image. The topographic features that extend radially away from the basin could be secondary craters or tectonic grooves related to the impact.

This view shows principally the leading hemisphere of Dione. The image was taken in visible light with Cassini's narrow angle camera on November 2, 2004, from a distance of 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees. North is up. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast enhanced to aid visibility of surface features.

[Caption updated on October 4, 2005.]

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: December 23, 2004 (PIA 06545)
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