Dione with Rings and Shadows

Dione hangs in front of Saturn and its icy rings in this view, captured during Cassini's final close flyby of the icy moon.

North on Dione is up. The image was obtained in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 17, 2015.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 45,000 miles (73,000 kilometers) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 35 degrees. Image scale is 3 miles (4 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 and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute