Dione and Saturn’s Rings

Dione’s beautiful wispy terrain is brightly lit alongside Saturn’s elegant rings.
The “wisps” are relatively young fractures on the trailing hemisphere of Dione’s (698 miles or 1123 kilometers across) icy surface.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Dione. North on Dione is up. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 15, 2015.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.7 million kilometers) from Dione. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

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

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute