This image was pieced together with about 45 photographs taken by the NASA fly-by mission with the robo-spacecraft Cassini. It shows how Saturn's 1122 kilometer diameter moon Dione has more craters on one side than the other. This is partially because Dione revolves much like the Earth's moon, meaning that one side of it is always facing towards Saturn. Although scientists believe the side that faces Saturn should be less impacted by craters, that is not the case. One explanation says that some of the impacts that created the craters were so strong they could have spun Dione on its axis so that it permanently changed the side that faces Saturn in revolution. Dione has a lot of texture across its surface, with cliffs of rock and ice, but the fact that all this structure and crater damage occurs on the exact side that it shouldn't is still a mystery to many astronomers.
No comments:
Post a Comment