Two slim crescents smile toward the Cassini spacecraft following an
occultation event.
Taken only five minutes after Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles
across) first approached the limb of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles
across), this view shows the bright little moon emerging from behind the
larger moon's crescent. (See PIA08229 for the earlier view.)
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 4, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.4
million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Rhea and 1.9 million kilometers
(1.2 million miles) from Enceladus. The view was obtained at a
Sun-moon-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 142 degrees relative to
both moons. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on Rhea and
11 kilometers (7 miles) on Enceladus.
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.
