Rhea is frozen in this Cassini portrait, captured just before it glided in front of Saturn's northern hemisphere. The wispy streaks on Rhea's trailing side are partly visible in the west.
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 red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees. Image scale is 17 kilometers (10 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.