Trailing Wisps

Wispy terrain reflects sunlight brightly in the lower left of this Cassini image of the northern latitudes of Saturn's moon Dione.
These "wisps" are actually fractures on the trailing hemisphere of Dione. See Dione's Icy Wisps to learn more.

Lit terrain seen here is between the trailing hemisphere and the Saturn-facing side 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. 20, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 107,000 kilometers (67,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. Image scale is 640 meters (2,100 feet) 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