Flying by Dione

Wispy terrain stretches across the trailing hemisphere of Saturn's moon Dione on the right of this Cassini image taken during the spacecraft's flyby on April 7, 2010.

See Highest Resolution View of Dione for an older, closer view of Dione's wispy fractures. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on Dione is up and rotated 1 degree to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 11 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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/Space Science Institute