Saturn's moon Rhea shows off the moon equivalent of a black eye -- a
bright, rayed crater near its eastern limb.
Rhea is about half the size of Earth's moon. At 1,528 kilometers (949
miles) across, it is the second-largest moon orbiting Saturn.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Oct. 24, 2004, at a distance of about 1.7 million
kilometers (1 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 40 degrees. The image scale is approximately 10
kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. Cassini will image this hemisphere of
Rhea again in mid-January 2005, just after the Huygens probe landing on
Titan - with approximately 1-kilometer (0.6-mile) resolution.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras,
were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based
at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.