Wispy Terrain on Dione

The famed wispy terrain on Saturn's moon Dione is front and center in this recent Cassini spacecraft image. The "wisps" are fresh fractures on the trailing hemisphere of the moon's icy surface.

See PIA10560 to learn more about Dione's wispy terrain.

This view is centered on 55 degrees north latitude and 85 degrees west longitude on Dione (698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers across). North is up and rotated 39 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 23, 2012. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 153,000 miles (246,000 kilometers) from Dione. Image scale is 0.9 miles (1.5 kilometers) 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.