Rhea's distinctive bright and relatively fresh-rayed crater lies in stark
contrast to the large, round basin which sits along the terminator (the
boundary between day and night) in this unmagnified view.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is Saturn's second-largest
moon.
North on Rhea is up and rotated about 15 degrees to the left. The sunlit
terrain shown here is on the moon's leading hemisphere.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 31, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.6
million kilometers (1 million miles) from Rhea and at a
Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees. The image scale is 10
kilometers (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 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
