Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

Sleek Rings, Rugged Moon

Caption: Rhea floats below the innermost regions of Saturn's amazing rings. This view of the the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) allows a glimpse of the wispy terrain that covers the trailing hemisphere of Rhea (see PIA06575 & PIA06578 for similar views of the wispy terrain).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Oct. 9, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees. The image scale is 12 kilometers (7 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Usage Restrictions: Image is in the public domain. Appropriate credit is requested.