Craters within craters cover the scarred face of Saturn's moon Rhea in
this oblique, high-resolution view of terrain on the moon's western
hemisphere.
A large, degraded crater lies at the center, filled with rolling mounds
and many smaller craters. A couple of linear depressions are visible in
the terrain (especially at lower right), possibly marking tectonic faults.
The crater is about 90 kilometers-wide (56-miles) and is located at 8.5
degrees south latitude, 154.9 west longitude. The moon's icy regolith, or
loose surface material, has likely been pummeled into a fine powder over
the eons.
This is one of the highest-resolution images of Rhea's surface obtained
during Cassini's close flyby on Nov. 26, 2005, during which the spacecraft
swooped to within 500 kilometers (310 miles) of the large moon. Rhea is
1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across and is Saturn's second largest moon,
after planet-sized Titan.
The clear filter image was acquired with the wide-angle camera at an
altitude of 620 kilometers (385 miles) above Rhea. Image scale is about
85 meters (280 feet) per pixel.
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.
