Rhea’s Relief

Image of the moon Rhea
April 27, 2005
PIA NumberPIA06637
Language
  • english

This Cassini image shows the cratered surface of Saturn's moon Rhea, with impact craters near
the terminator thrown into sharp relief. Rhea is Saturn's second-largest moon, at 1,528 kilometers
(949 miles across).

This view shows the leading hemisphere on Rhea. North is up and tilted 23 degrees to the left.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 12, 2005,
through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The
view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (950,000 miles) from
Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 70 degrees. Resolution in the image is 9
kilometers (6 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 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