The sunlight angle in this sharp view of Saturn's second-largest moon,
Rhea, highlights the moon's crater-strewn surface. Cassini will fly past
Rhea on Nov. 26, 2005, at a distance of only 500 kilometers (311 miles)
and will obtain very high resolution images at that time. Rhea's diameter
is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles).
This view shows mainly the hemisphere of Rhea that faces away from Saturn.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Nov. 1, 2004, at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers
(994,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 102 degrees. North is up. The image scale is about 10 kilometers (6
miles) per pixel. The image has been slightly contrast enhanced to aid
visibility of surface features.
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.