Two Saturnian moons meet in the sky. Dione departs after crossing the face
of Rhea for several minutes.
Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across), at right, has a notably
smoother-looking surface than Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles
across), suggesting the former has been modified more recently.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 14, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.7
million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Dione and 3.1 million
kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Rhea. The Sun-moon-spacecraft, or
phase, angle is about 134 degrees on both moons. Image scale is 16
kilometers (10 miles) per pixel on Dione and 18 kilometers (11 miles) per
pixel on Rhea.
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.