The Cassini spacecraft surveys the stark beauty of Saturn's moon Rhea.
Rhea's north pole is up and tilted slightly away from Cassini in this
view; the moon's south pole is in sunlight at bottom. Lit terrain seen
here is on the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles
across).
The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 10, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 420,000 kilometers (261,000 miles) from Rhea and at a
Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 53 degrees. Image scale is 3
kilometers (2 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.
