Cassini’s new breathtaking images of Saturn’s moon

“Right down to the last, Cassini has faithfully delivered another extraordinary set of riches”.

A pockmarked, icy landscape looms beneath NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in new images of Saturn’s moon Dione taken during the mission’s last close approach to the small, icy world. “How lucky we have been”. Researchers want to know whether Dione is geological active like some of Saturn’s other moons.

Cassini was 295 miles above Dione’s surface at 2:33 pm ET on August 17, marking its fifth close encounter with Saturn’s icy moon. Its closest-ever Dione flyby came in December 2011 when it passed with 60 miles of the moon’s surface.

While this marks the last time Cassini will make a close pass of Dione, it isn’t the first time the spacecraft has captured flyby photos of the moon. 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.

As such, its camera was not in control of where the craft’s direction was pointed which means there was no certainty that it could capture Dione clearly.

It is still slated to visit Enceladus, Saturn’s moon that is said to harbor water, three more times before the year ends. The view was acquired at an altitude of approximately 470 miles above Dione and has an image scale of about 150 feet per pixel. Over the course of next few months, Cassini scientists will be studying data from the gravity science experiment and magnetosphere and plasma science instruments to look for clues about Dione’s interior structure and processes affecting its surface. This view shows the region as a contrast-enhanced image in which features in shadow are illuminated by reflected light from Saturn.

This view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows terrain on Saturn’s moon Dione that is entirely lit by reflected light from Saturn, called Saturnshine.

Launched in 1997, the Cassini mission has been working since July 2004 to study the gas giant and its huge family of 62 moons and several smaller moonlets. It has had four close flybys with the moon before making its latest expedition. For its final mission in 2017, Cassini is going to take repeated plunges in space between Saturn and its rings.