CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Looking Over Dione's Wisps

Looking Over Dione's Wisps
PIA 12740
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   Cassini looks across the surface of Saturn's moon Dione and details the "wispy" terrain first chronicled by Voyager.

This fractured terrain covers the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1123 kilometers, 698 miles across). See PIA10560 to learn more. This view is centered on terrain at 53 degrees north latitude, 209 degrees west longitude.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 17, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 61,000 kilometers (38,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 32 degrees. Image scale is 363 meters (1,190 feet) per pixel.

The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: November 15, 2010 (PIA 12740)
Image/Caption Information


Alliance Member Comments
Red_dragon (Nov 16, 2010 at 2:33 PM):
According to Cassini's web page, if everything goes fine she should be ready again just in time for the next Enceladus flyby -day 30 (tuesday, by the way) of this month-
NeKto (Nov 16, 2010 at 9:07 AM):
Like stowaway and Red-dragon, Ciclops has been a regular stop for me every day i have web access. Usually my last stop. i like to spend as much time here as i can. i have been able to relate so much that i have seen in these images to orbital dynamics, gravitation, "geo"physics, and a great deal more. i have enjoyed the woderful learning experience that has been Cassini to date, and look forward to more. i have also learned a lot from the insiteful and inteligent comments from many of the Sector Six Aliance members.
all together, this has made ciclops my favorite web site. I think having someone as talented and intelligent as Carolyn Porco leading the team, that has no shortage of intelligence or talent anywhere, may have something to do with that.
Here's hoping those immensely talented engineers at JPL get our little robot friend back on line soon.
Red_dragon (Nov 15, 2010 at 4:16 PM):
100% with stowaway -except that the "Latest Sight" was my lunch's companion, not my breakfast's one. I even remember CICLOPS *never* failed to release the daily image; just one time (May 2006) it wasn't released at the usual hour, but the cause -probably- was cosmic ray-induced glitch on Cassini (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/significantevents/sigevent20060505/)

Hope this is just temporal; I always came here early in the morning (for you) and very often I left at least a vote.
stowaway (Nov 15, 2010 at 2:52 PM):
Personally, I really miss the daily "Latest Sight" images. They keep me in touch with the Cassini program of exploration much better than once a week images and/or email alerts. For several years now, visiting Saturn has been a part of my daily life. This has been the first website I would visit each morning and I have learned a great deal and collected each of the images for my Cassini screensaver. But I also understand someone (probably Professor Porco herself) has to take the time to select, post and comment on the images but I feel it is a very worthwhile undertaking.
Red_dragon (Nov 15, 2010 at 7:57 AM):
Good question. I was making the same one.
rulesfor (Nov 15, 2010 at 7:04 AM):
Are new pictures now only added every Monday, rather than every weekday? Is this permanent or temporary? Is it related to the end of the Equinox mission and the beginning of the Solstice mission? Anybody know anything?