Rhea enters the Cassini spacecraft's field of view and glides lazily
across the scene as the spacecraft observes Saturn's restless atmosphere.
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 rings form a dark line across center and
cast shadows onto the northern half of this view. The A ring and B ring
cast the darker shadows compared to the C ring and the Cassini division,
which are less dense.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Aug. 13, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 4.1 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 24 kilometers (15 miles) per pixel on Saturn and 21
kilometers (13 miles) per pixel on Rhea.
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.
