This half-lit view beautifully captures the ponderously old and cratered
surface of Saturn's icy moon Rhea. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles)
across.
The sunlit terrain shown here is on the moon's leading hemisphere, on the
side of Rhea that always faces toward Saturn. North is up and rotated 20
degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 21, 2005, at a distance of approximately
922,000 kilometers (573,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 88 degrees. The image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.