Icy Traveller

Dione floats past, with Saturn's rings beyond.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across). North is up. The darker terrain on the moon's trailing side is partly visible here, along with one of the bright linea -- the bright fractures that crisscross Dione's trailing side.

The view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from less than a degree below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 26, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 883,000 kilometers (549,000 miles) from Dione. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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