Low Contrast Rhea

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 Where Have All the Shadows Gone?.

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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute