Looking Over Dione's Wisps

The Cassini spacecraft looks across the surface of Saturn's moon Dione and details the "wispy" terrain first chronicled by Voyager.

This fractured terrain covers the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). See PIA10560 to learn more. This view is centered on terrain at 53 degrees north latitude, 209 degrees west longitude.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 17, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 61,000 kilometers (38,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 32 degrees. Image scale is 363 meters (1,190 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.