Wisps on Dione

The Cassini spacecraft spies bright fractures in the icy crust of Dione. These bright "linea" cover the moon's trailing hemisphere and were imaged by Cassini at high resolution in 2005 (see At Carthage Linea ).

This view looks toward the northern hemisphere on Dione's anti-Saturn side. North on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) is up and rotated 33 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 1, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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