Cassini looks down upon Rhea, whose cratered surface was already ancient
before any complex life developed on Earth. The terrain seen here has
probably changed little in the past billion years.
This view shows terrain on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528
kilometers, or 949 miles across). North is up.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 21, 2006 at a distance of approximately
94,000 kilometers (59,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 109 degrees. Image scale is 558 meters (1,832 feet)
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.