High Contrast Wisps

Sunlight highlights the bright, wispy features on the trailing hemisphere of Saturn's moon Dione.

These wispy features are a system of braided canyons with bright walls caused by fractures. See Highest Resolution View of Dione and At Carthage Linea to learn more.

This view looks most directly toward the anti-Saturn side of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on Dione is up. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 27, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 105,000 kilometers (65,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 44 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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/Space Science Institute