The ancient and battered surface of Saturn's moon Rhea shows a notable
dark swath of territory near the eastern limb in this image from Cassini.
This view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Rhea (1,528
kilometers, or 949 miles across). North is up and tilted 40 degrees to
the right.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 7, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet
light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Rhea and at
a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 10 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been
contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.
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 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.
