The Cassini spacecraft acquired this detailed view of Rhea just before the
moon slipped into an eclipse by Saturn's shadow.
During the eclipse, the wide-angle camera acquired support observations
for Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument. Such
images help confirm CIRS' pointing on the sky as that instrument observed
Rhea's infrared radiation in the absence of solar illumination.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers,
or 949 miles across). North is toward the top of the image and rotated 23
degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 14, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 506,000 kilometers (315,000 miles) from Rhea and at a
Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 32 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.
