Like a silvery pearl, an icy moon crosses the face of Saturn, while two of
its siblings cast shadows onto the planet.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) hangs in the foreground. Near
upper left on Saturn is the small shadow of Mimas. Near lower right is the
penumbral shadow of Iapetus -- the part of the moon's shadow where Iapetus
does not completely block the sun.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than
a degree above the ringplane. The rings' shadows drape across the northern
hemisphere.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 15, 2007, at a distance of
approximately 1.2 million kilometers (744,000 miles) from Rhea and 1.7
million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 71
kilometers (44 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 103 kilometers (64 miles) on
Saturn.
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.