Dione Divided

Dione appears cut in two by Saturn's razor-thin rings, seen nearly edge-on in a view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This scene was captured from just 0.02 degrees above the ring plane.

The bright streaks of Dione's wispy terrain (see PIA12553) are seen near the moon's limb at right. The medium-sized crater Turnus (63 miles, 101 kilometers, wide) is visible along Dione's terminator.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 25, 2015. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115 degrees. Image scale is 8.6 miles (13.8 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.