When naming features on other worlds, scientists like to follow themes,
and Dione is no exception. Dione possesses numerous features with names
from Virgil's "Aeneid." The prominent crater showing a central peak below
the center is Dido, a 118-kilometer-wide (73-mile) crater named after the
supposed founder of Carthage. The crater just above Dido is Antenor, an
82-kilometer-wide (51-mile) impact crater named after the nephew of Priam
who founded the Italian city of Padua. At the upper right is the
97-kilometer-wide (60-mile) impact crater Turnus, which lies at the
western end of Carthage Linea, a region of bright, fractured terrain.
Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.
The sunlit terrain seen here shows some of the wispy markings on the
moon's trailing hemisphere. Cassini revealed that these markings are
actually a complex system of fractures.
North on Dione is up and rotated 25 degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 25, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.1
million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Dione and at a
Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 107 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel. The image has been
magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.
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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
