Barren Pole

This view looks toward Rhea's north polar region, where icy fractures slither away toward the south.

Lit terrain in this view is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 4, 2006 at a distance of approximately 773,000 kilometers (480,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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