As the Cassini spacecraft slid between the Sun and Rhea, it caught this
view of the moon at almost full opposition.
North on Rhea is up in this image, and, in the southern hemisphere, the
faint outlines of a ray crater are visible. Lines, or rays, of debris from
an impact streak outward from the crater on the left.
This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Rhea with a
Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 0.4 degrees.
With the sun almost directly behind Cassini, topographic details such as
the crater are washed out by the sun's brightness. More contrast between
these details is visible from greater phase angles (see see PIA07609).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Oct. 27, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.285
million kilometers (799,000 miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 8 kilometers
(5 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
