Saturn's brightly sunlit moon Rhea commands the foreground in this image
from Cassini. The planet's splendid rings are discernible in the
background. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.
The spacecraft was just above the ringplane when it acquired this image,
and thus captured the darkened appearance of the dense B ring when viewed
with sunlight filtered through the rings. From this perspective, bright
areas in the rings are regions of low density, containing very small
particles that effectively scatter light toward Cassini.
North on Rhea is up and rotated about 25 degrees to the left. This view
shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Rhea. The right side of
Rhea is overexposed.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately
540,000 kilometers (340,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 110 degrees. The image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, 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.
