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Dione's Icy Wisps

Jan. 20, 2009
NASA's Cassini spacecraft views the 'wisps' on the surface of the Saturnian moon, Dione, looking from afar much the way they looked to the Voyager cameras years ago. These linea cover the trailing hemisphere of the moon.

The Cassini spacecraft views the "wisps" on the surface of the Saturnian moon, Dione, looking from afar much the way they looked to the Voyager cameras years ago. These linea cover the trailing hemisphere of the moon.

Cassini high resolution images revealed these bright features to be geologically young fractures exposing the icy surface of the moon. (See PIA07638).

North on Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across) is up in this image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 30, 2008 at a distance of approximately 858,000 kilometers (533,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 61 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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