Crescent of Craters

The Cassini spacecraft captures a crescent of crater-covered surface on the moon Rhea.

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 24, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 652,000 kilometers (405,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 129 degrees. Image scale is 4 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