PIA12594: High Contrast Wisps
 Target Name:  Dione
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Wide Angle
 Product Size:  520 x 520 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA12594.tif (270.9 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA12594.jpg (7.838 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Sunlight highlights the bright, wispy features on the trailing hemisphere of Saturn's moon Dione.

These wispy features are a system of braided canyons with bright walls caused by fractures. See PIA06163 and PIA07638 to learn more.

This view looks most directly toward the anti-Saturn side of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on Dione is up. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 27, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 105,000 kilometers (65,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 44 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2010-03-22