Dione Up Front

Saturn's moon Dione coasts along in its orbit appearing in front of its parent planet in this Cassini spacecraft view.

The wispy terrain on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across) can be seen on the left of the moon here. See Dione's Icy Wisps to learn more.

The tiny moon Telesto (25 kilometers, or 16 miles across) is visible as a white speck above and to the left of the rings in this view. Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across) appears just below the rings near the center of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 18, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute