Rhea's crater-saturated surface shows a large bright blotch, which was
likely created when a geologically recent impact sprayed bright, fresh
ice ejecta over the moon's surface.
The rim of the great Tirawa impact basin can be seen near the top of the
image. The giant feature is approximately 360 kilometers (220 miles)
across.
This equatorial view captures Rhea's leading hemisphere. North is up and
rotated 40 degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 28, 2006 at a distance of approximately
481,000 kilometers (299,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 23 degrees. 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 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.