Rhea displays a prominent scar in this view from Cassini. A large and
ancient impact basin can be seen at upper right. The giant feature occurs
within a terrain that appears rugged and which likely is saturated with
other smaller craters.
Rhea is Saturn's second-largest moon at 1,528 kilometers (949 miles)
across. This view shows terrain on the moon's trailing hemisphere. North
is up.
The image was taken in polarized ultraviolet light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 24, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Rhea and at a
Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 117 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been
magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.
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.