This close view of Rhea prominently shows two large impact basins on the
ancient and battered moon. The great age of these basins is suggested by
the large number of smaller craters that are overprinted within them.
Ejecta from the bright, relatively young crater seen in PIA07609 spreads
from the eastern limb. Terrain visible in this view is on the side of Rhea
(1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) that faces away from Saturn. North
on Rhea is up and tilted 30 degrees to the left.
See PIA07686 for a similar enhanced color
view.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Dec. 23, 2005 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 930 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of
approximately 341,000 kilometers (212,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 42 degrees. The image scale is
2 kilometers (1 mile) 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
