A serene orb of ice is set against the gentle pastel clouds of giant
Saturn. Rhea transits the face of the gas giant, whose darkened rings and
their planet-hugging shadows appear near upper right.
Rhea is the second largest of Saturn's moons at 1,528 kilometers (949
miles) across. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings
from about 3 degrees above the ring plane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The view was acquired with the wide-angle
camera on Feb. 4, 2007. Cassini acquired the view at a distance of
approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and
679,000 kilometers (422,000 miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 68 kilometers
(42 miles) per pixel on Saturn and about 40 kilometers (25 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.