The giant Tirawa impact basin straddles the day and night boundary on
Saturn's moon Rhea in this view from the Cassini spacecraft. The ancient
basin is 5 kilometers (3 miles) deep in places, as measured in NASA
Voyager images. The basin is 360 kilometers (220 miles) across.
The prominent bright splotch to the southeast of Tirawa is ejecta from a
fairly fresh crater. This feature can be seen at much higher resolution in
PIA06648. This view of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) reveals
terrain slightly to the east of a similar Cassini view, released earlier
(see PIA07539). The sunlit surface in this view is principally on the
leading hemisphere of Rhea. North is up and rotated 13 degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 13, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2
million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Rhea and at a
Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 50 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been
contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
