Cassini looks upward at the south polar region on Rhea during a recent
distant encounter. Rhea's icy surface is so heavily saturated with impact
craters that the moon's limb, or edge, has a rugged, bumpy appearance.
Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.
The bright splotch seen here near the upper right is impact material (or
ejecta) from a relatively fresh crater (see PIA06648 for another view
of this bright feature).
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
July 14, 2005, at a distance of approximately 342,000 kilometers (212,000
miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 36
degrees. The image was obtained using a filter sensitive to wavelengths
of infrared light centered at 298 nanometers. The image scale is 2
kilometers (1 mile) 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.
