Rhea brushes the stormy face of Saturn, an airless ice orb against the
feathery bands of a gas giant.
Saturn's unilluminated rings are seen at upper right. Rhea is the second
largest of Saturn's moons at 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.
This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees
above the ringplane.
The image was taken in wavelengths of polarized infrared light with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 4, 2007. Cassini acquired the
view at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles)
from Saturn and 679,000 kilometers (422,000 miles) from Rhea. Image scale
is 137 kilometers (85 miles) per pixel on Saturn and about 80 kilometers
(50 miles) per pixel on Rhea.
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.