Dione's southern polar region (shown here) contains fractures whose softened appearance suggests that they have different ages than the bright braided fractures seen in the image to the north. This region is also notably brighter than the near equatorial terrain at the top of the image.

At the center, several of the bright, radial streaks mark a feature named Cassandra, which may be a rayed crater or a tectonic feature.

This view of Dione (1,118 kilometers, or 695 miles across) captures high southern latitudes on the moon's trailing hemisphere.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately 269,000 kilometers (167,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 41 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1.2 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

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.