Two small portions of Saturn's F ring shine brilliantly in scattered
sunlight as Rhea floats in the distance beyond.
Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than
a degree above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on July 20, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 915,000 kilometers (569,000 miles) from Rhea and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 151 degrees. Image scale is 5
kilometers (3 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.