CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Wisps Under the Rings

Dione's beautiful "wispy terrain" is brightly lit along side Saturn's elegant rings.

The "wisps" are relatively young fractures on the trailing hemisphere of Dione's (698 miles or 1123 kilometers across) icy surface. See PIA06162 and PIA06163 for higher resolution views of Dione's wispy terrain.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Dione. North on Dione is up. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 15, 2015.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.7 million kilometers) from Dione. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) 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/Space Science Institute
Released: December 28, 2015 (PIA 18346)
Image/Caption Information 		  Wisps Under the Rings
PIA 18346
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