NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made is a fifth flyby of Saturn’s moon Dione, allowing it to capture fantastic photos of its cratered surface. “How lucky we have been”, she said.
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Carolyn Porco, the Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., praised the craft in a statement on NASA’s website, calling the images exquisite. Dione measures about 698 miles (1,123 kilometers) around its equator, and orbits around Saturn in just three Earth days. It was an added advantage that the spacecraft captured detailed final images. Since then, astronomers have been able to get a glimpse at the ringed planet’s diverse moons, the largest collection orbiting any planet in our solar system. This was the last time Cassini will make a flyby of the moon, but this is not the first time the spacecraft has captured pictures of the moon. Like numerous other Saturnian satellites, Dione has been revealed as a more complex and active world than previously imagined.
As Cassini soared above high northern latitudes on Saturn’s moon Dione, the spacecraft looked down at a region near the day-night boundary. Cassini will also pass by many of Saturn’s small, irregularly shaped moons- including Daphnis, Telesto, Epimetheus and Aegaeon – at similar distances during this time.
In this image, taken when Cassini was still 170,000 km from the moon, gives you a sense of the beating it’s taken over the eons (this is a mosaic of nine separate images, one taken with a lower resolution camera, which is why part of the moon is blurrier).
Scientists hope to learn more about Dione’s interior structure and geologic processes by studying the images, and data gathered using the magnetosphere, and plasma and gravity science instruments, aboard the space probe. Scientists have found that they the extra sunlight reflecting from the gas-giant which could help to illuminate more features that are hidden in the shadows of the moon’s craters.
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Late next year the Cassini space probe will attempt a grand finale, during which it will dive between Saturn and the innermost of the rings on 22 occasions, provided it isn’t destroyed by small particles similar to those that shoal together to form them.
