Dione Decoration

Saturn's fourth largest moon, Dione, appears like a solitary ornament suspended above the rings in this Cassini spacecraft view.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on Dione is up and rotated 1 degree to the right.

The rings are closer to Cassini in this view, with Dione more distant. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 85 degrees. Image scale is 19 kilometers (12 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

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