The rings cannot hide the ragged, icy crescent of Rhea, here imaged in
color by the Cassini spacecraft. The second-largest moon of Saturn shines
brightly through gaps in the rings.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) lies beyond the dim, unlit
side of the rings. A diffuse clump of material lies in the F ring, on the
side nearest to Cassini.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view, which approximates the scene as it might
appear to human eyes. The view was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 1, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.2
million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 118 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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.