Background Planet

Rhea drifts in front of Saturn. The battered, icy moon is seen here near the western limb of the planet's northern hemisphere.

This image was taken eight hours after The Rays of Rhea. The view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 576,000 kilometers (358,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 12 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute