Gray and barren Rhea drifts beneath Saturn's more colorful rings. Bright
wispy markings on the trailing hemisphere of Rhea are just visible curling
along the western limb.
Above the icy moon, Saturn's shadow darkens the ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this color image, which approximates what the human eye might see.
The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle
camera on Oct. 13, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.7 million
kilometers (1 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 100 degrees. North on Rhea is up. The image scale is 10
kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles)
across.
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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.