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PIA12743: Eyeing Erulus Crater
NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped this shot of cratered Dione as it flew by the Saturnian moon on Oct. 17, 2010. The large crater at the center of the image is Erulus.
 Target Name:  Dione
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens 
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle 
 Product Size:  1018 x 1018 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA12743.tif (1.038 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA12743.jpg (123.6 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

The Cassini spacecraft snapped this shot of cratered Dione as it flew by the Saturnian moon on Oct. 17, 2010.

The large crater at the center of the image is Erulus, which is about 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, across. This view looks toward the southern latitudes of the leading hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 41,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 53 degrees. Image scale is 240 meters (787 feet) 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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2010-12-06