The Cassini spacecraft looks toward Rhea's cratered, icy landscape with
the dark line of Saturn's ringplane and the planet's murky atmosphere as a
background.
Rhea is Saturn's second-largest moon, at 1,528 kilometers (949 miles)
across.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than
a degree above the ringplane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 17, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 1.2 million kilometers (770,000 miles) from Rhea. Image
scale is 7 kilometers (5 miles) 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.