The Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn has churned out new images of the moon, Dione. Imagery was taken on Sept. 4, 2010 and includes the best views of Dione’s north pole region that Cassini has captured to date.
“Just in … crisp, detailed raw images from Cassini’s close flyby of Dione earlier today,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team Leader and Director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The new imagery includes views of Dione’s north polar region at a never-before-seen resolution, Porco added.
“Notice especially the long, bright ice cliffs crossing a region of the moon that, during the Voyager mission, became known as the ‘wispy terrain’. Voyager couldn’t resolve what Cassini has since seen in great detail,” Porco said, “that this terrain is not crossed by wispy-looking bands of hummocky bright ice, as was previously thought, but instead is laced with organized sets of fractures that reveal bright, clean, sub-surface ice.”
Cassini completed its initial four-year mission to explore the Saturn System in June 2008. Now, the healthy spacecraft is working overtime on the Cassini Equinox Mission, seeking answers to new questions raised in Cassini’s first years at Saturn.
The mission’s extension, through September 2010, is named for the Saturnian equinox, which occurs in August 2009 when the sun will shine directly on the equator and then begin to illuminate the northern hemisphere and the rings’ northern face.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
For the new, just issued imagery, go to:
http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/141/Dione_Rev_137_Raw_Preview?js=1
By Leonard David
