This map of the surface of Saturn's moon, Rhea, illustrates the regions
that will be imaged by Cassini during the spacecraft's close flyby of the
moon on Nov. 26, 2005. At closest approach, the spacecraft is expected to
pass approximately 500 kilometers (310 miles) above the moon's surface.
The colored lines delineate the regions that will be imaged at differing
resolutions, listed in the legend at bottom. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949
miles) across.
The new high-resolution coverage will examine details on the anti-Saturn
hemisphere of Rhea, including two large impact basins there. Cassini
previously imaged terrain farther to the south of this at approximately 1
kilometer (0.6 mile) per pixel in August 2005 (see PIA07566). Imaging
scientists also hope to get a high-resolution view of a relatively young
50-kilometer-wide (30-mile) crater on the moon's leading hemisphere (see
PIA06648). Planetary scientists are interested in learning about the
compositional makeup of Rhea, other than water ice, as well as the nature
of the wispy streaks on the moon's trailing hemisphere. In December, 2004,
Cassini revealed that similar bright, wispy markings on Dione are actually
a system of braided tectonic fractures (see PIA06162).
The map was made from images obtained by both the Cassini and NASA
Voyager spacecraft.
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.
