Profiling Dione's Wisps

Wispy terrain winds across the trailing hemisphere of Saturn's moon Dione in this Cassini view taken during the spacecraft's Jan. 27, 2010 non-targeted flyby.

Cassini came within about 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) of the moon during this flyby, but this image was acquired at a distance of approximately 137,000 kilometers (85,000 miles) from Dione. See PIA06163 for an older, closer view of Dione's wispy fractures. This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side and trailing hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on Dione is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 27, 2010. The view was obtained at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 38 degrees. Image scale is 819 meters (2,687 feet) 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.