Cratered Iceball

Scarred and battered Rhea fills the Cassini spacecraft's view. Notable here is the sharp relief of steep crater walls near the terminator.

Icy Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is Saturn's second-largest moon.
This view shows terrain on Rhea's trailing hemisphere. North is up and rotated 22 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 24, 2005 at a distance of approximately 267,000 kilometers (166,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 59 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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