Beyond the ansa of Saturn's rings, a crescent Rhea completes this
ring-and-moon composition.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is near the middle of the
bottom of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of
the rings from about 4 degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Aug. 24, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 1.6 million kilometers (994,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 137 degrees. Image scale is 95
kilometers (59 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.