Dione Beneath the Rings

Dione underneath Saturn’s wispy F ring. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Click to enlarge.
Saturn’s moon Dione is about to swing around the edge of the thin F ring in this color view. More than one thin strand of the F ring’s tight spiral can be seen here.

The terrain seen on Dione is on the moon’s Saturn-facing hemisphere. The diameter of Dione is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles).

Images taken using infrared, green and ultraviolet spectral filters were composited to create this color view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 48 degrees. The image scale is 12 kilometers (7 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 .

Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release