Crossing Dione

Saturn's nearly edge-on rings are caught between two moons.

The edge of the F ring has a blurred appearance with bright Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) as a backdrop. Oblong Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) transits Dione and heads off toward right.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 24, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Dione at an image scale of about 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.