The battered features of the moon Rhea, seen at low phase, appear washed
out by the sun.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Rhea at a
sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 15 degrees. To see Rhea at an even
lower phase angle -- near opposition -- see PIA10542.
North on Rhea (1528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is up and rotated 7
degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 26, 2009. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from
Rhea. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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.