Craters on a Crescent

A couple of craters share a crescent of lit terrain on Saturn's moon Rhea.

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Rhea (1528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). This view is centered on 48 degrees north latitude, 234 degrees west longitude. The north pole is on the terminator about one-quarter of the way inward from the top of the image.

The image was taken in visible violet light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 121 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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