Like the rest of Rhea's surface, the southern polar region of this Saturn
moon has been extensively re-worked by cratering over the eons. This
close-up shows that most sizeable craters have smaller, younger impact
sites within them. Near the left lies an intriguing gash.
The largest well-defined crater visible here is an oval-shaped impact
toward the upper right. The crater is 115 by 91 kilometers (71 by 57
miles) in size.
Cassini acquired this view during a distant flyby of Rhea (1,528
kilometers, or 949 miles across) on July 14, 2005.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 239,000 kilometers
(149,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 56 degrees. The image was obtained using a filter sensitive to
wavelengths of infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The image scale
is about 1 kilometer (0.6 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
