Wisp-covered Rhea

Rhea
PIA NumberPIA09809
Language
  • english

Wispy markings on Rhea reach across the moon's icy surface. The Tirawa impact basin is seen straddling the terminator at upper right. The crater is about 360 kilometers (220 miles) across.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 29, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute