Bright sunlight on Rhea shows off the cratered surface of Saturn's second
largest moon.
See PIA09895 and PIA10464 to learn more about this moon.
Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Rhea. North on Rhea
(1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is up.
Scale in the original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The
image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid
visibility.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 21, 2009. The view was obtained at
a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from
Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 40 degrees.
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.