Lit brilliantly by the sun, the moon Rhea shows off its huge ray crater.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 812,000 kilometers
(505,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of
4 degrees. This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Rhea (1,528
kilometers, 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up and rotated 30 degrees
to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 26, 2009. Image scale is 5
kilometers (3 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.