The night side of Rhea shines softly in reflected light from Saturn. A
similar effect, called Earthshine, can often be seen dimly illuminating
the dark side Earth's moon.
Background stars make short, dim trails across the black sky. The sunlit
terrain on Rhea is so much brighter than the part lit by Saturn that the
former is completely overexposed in this view, which took more than 30
seconds to acquire.
This view looks toward the leading hemisphere on Rhea (1,528 kilometers,
or 949 miles across). North is up and rotated 28 degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 364,000 kilometers (226,000 miles) from Rhea and at a
Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 154 degrees. Image scale is 4
kilometers (3 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
