Saturn's moon Rhea is an alien ice world, but in this frame-filling view
it is vaguely familiar. Here, Rhea's cratered surface looks in some ways
similar to our own Moon, or the planet Mercury. But make no mistake --
Rhea's icy exterior would quickly melt if this moon were brought as close
to the Sun as Mercury. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.
Instead, Rhea preserves a record of impacts at its post in the outer solar
system. The large impact crater at the center left (near the terminator
or boundary between day and night), called Izanagi, is just one of the
numerous large impact basins on Rhea.
This view shows principally Rhea's southern polar region, centered on 58
degrees South, 265 degrees West.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately
255,000 kilometers (158,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 62 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1.2 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
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.
