Impact-battered Rhea exhibits a mottled appearance in this image from the
Cassini spacecraft. On an ancient surface such as this, large impact
basins are often peppered with many smaller craters. The image shows
principally the trailing hemisphere of this icy moon, Saturn's second
largest. Rhea's diameter is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Dec. 9, 2004, at a distance of 2.3 million kilometers
(1.4 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 60 degrees. The image scale is about 14 kilometers (9 miles)
per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast
enhanced to aid visibility.
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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
