CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Dione Up Front

Dione Up Front
PIA 14572
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   Saturn's moon Dione coasts along in its orbit appearing in front of its parent planet in this Cassini view.

The wispy terrain on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1123 kilometers, 698 miles across) can be seen on the left of the moon here. See PIA10560 to learn more.

The tiny moon Telesto (25 kilometers, 16 miles across) is visible as a white speck above and to the left of the rings in this view. Epimetheus (113 kilometers, 70 miles across) appears just below the rings near the center of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 18, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) 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-Caltech/SSI
Released: September 5, 2011 (PIA 14572)
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