NASA Releases Images Of Saturn’s Moon Dione During Cassini’s Final Flyby

The Cassini spacecraft recently got its last close views of Dione, a small icy moon orbiting Saturn, and the results are astounding.

Crater-pocked Dione was in spotlight this week; it is one among the 50 known moons of Saturn.

The space probe was nearly 300 miles away when it captured the shots.

“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 Universität Berlin, said in a news release. The view was acquired at an altitude of approximately 470 miles above Dione and has an image scale of about 150 feet per pixel.

Next year the probe will head through Saturn’s rings and the year after it will be made to self-destruct.

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.

The brightest sections of Saturn’s rings start around 7000 kms above its cloud tops and extend outwards to 80,000 kilometres, and as the mission has amply demonstrated, contain a host of complex and dynamic features that have posed far more riddles than answers for astronomers. The images, which show the cratered and pockmarked surface of the small icy world, were taken by the Cassini probe, which entered into orbit around the planet in 2004.

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. The moon circles Saturn just under 3 Earth days.

Cassini scientists will study data from the gravity science experiment and magnetosphere and plasma science instruments over the next few months as they look for clues about Dione’s interior structure and processes affecting its surface.

Later in 2015, it will be making three approaches to the moon Enceladus while it passes as close as 30 miles from the geologically active moon’s surface on October 28.

NASA added that the spacecraft would dive into Saturn’s rings, before it ends its mission.

One of the most significant findings of the Cassini mission is that there’s a flimsy oxygen atmosphere in that world.

NASA has more information about the mission and this last look at Dione here.