Rhea and Enceladus

Saturn's moons Rhea and Enceladus
April 5, 2005
PIA NumberPIA06620
Language
  • english

Though much farther away from Cassini when the spacecraft acquired this image, Saturn's second-largest moon Rhea still dwarfs the brightest icy moon Enceladus in this scene. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across. Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 21, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Enceladus and 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Rhea. The image scale is 12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Enceladus, and 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Rhea.

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute