Recalling Voyager

Like the Voyager spacecraft that came before, the Cassini spacecraft chronicles ''wispy'' terrain on Saturn's moon Dione.

See Dione's Icy Wisps to view another image of these bright fractures on the moon's trailing hemisphere. This view looks toward the area between the Saturn-facing side and trailing hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 26, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 42 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