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PIA14654: Rhea's Record
The surface of Saturn's moon Rhea bears witness to its violent history. Each crater seen here by NASA's Cassini spacecraft records an impact in the moon's past.
 Target Name:  Rhea
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens 
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle 
 Product Size:  1016 x 1016 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA14654.tif (1.033 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA14654.jpg (189.3 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

The surface of Saturn's moon Rhea bears witness to its violent history. Each crater seen here records an impact in the moon's past.

On some of Rhea's terrains, craters are so densely packed that they lie on top of each other, newer impacts often erasing the older craters. Rhea is 949 miles, or 1,528 kilometers across.

This view is centered on terrain at 38 degrees north latitude, 290 degrees west longitude. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 22, 2012.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 19,000 miles (31,000 kilometers) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Image scale is 600 feet (183 meters) 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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2013-03-25