Crater-scarred Rhea floats in the distance, peeking out from behind
Saturn's partly shadowed rings. This view looks upward from just beneath
the ringplane. The far side of the rings is masked by Saturn's shadow. The
north pole of Rhea is obscured by part of the A ring and the sharply
defined F ring.
A few bright wispy markings curl around the eastern limb of Rhea (1,528
kilometers, or 949 miles across).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 22, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.2
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Rhea. The image scale is 13
kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Rhea.
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.