With the use of the spacecraft’s wide-angle camera, images of Dione’s terrain were taken with the additional light from Saturnshine or the light reflected from Saturn.
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It is known that Saturn has 62 moons. “Right down to the last, Cassini has faithfully delivered another extraordinary set of riches”.
Cassini made its fifth flyby of Saturn’s moon Dione this week and captured stunning images of its cratered surface.
“We had just enough time to snap a few images, giving us nice, high resolution looks at the surface”, Tilmann Denk, a Cassini participating scientist at Freie University in Berlin, said in the statement. Since 2004, the spacecraft has been exploring Saturn and its moons. Cassini is scheduled to make three approaches to the geologically active moon Enceladus on October 14 and 28, and December 19, passing just 30 miles from its surface on October 28.
Once Cassini runs out of fuel, it will make its final dive into Saturn’s atmosphere, burning up in the process.
Because this week’s flyby focused on gravity science rather than imaging, Cassini’s camera wasn’t controlling where the spacecraft aimed, complicating its ability to capture clear images. Saturn has the most number of moons orbiting any planet in the Earth’s solar system. “These passes will provide some of Cassini’s best-ever views of the little moons”. A record of impacts large and small is preserved in the moon’s ancient, icy surface.
After this flyby, Cassini will not anymore be making any close approaches to Dione. The view was acquired at an altitude of approximately 470 miles above Dione and has an image scale of about 150 feet per pixel. This view shows the region as a contrast-enhanced image in which features in shadow are illuminated by reflected light from Saturn. Researchers say that they will get a trove of data to determine what’s been happening beneath the surface. “Cassini will, however, make almost two dozen passes by a menagerie of Saturn’s small, irregularly shaped moons – including Daphnis, Telesto, Epimetheus and Aegaeon – at similar distances during this time”, it added.
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The Cassini-Huygens mission concludes in late 2017, with the spacecraft repeatedly diving through the space between Saturn and its rings during its final year.
