Crossing Saturn

Rhea brushes the stormy face of Saturn, an airless ice orb against the feathery bands of a gas giant.

Saturn's unilluminated rings are seen at upper right. Rhea is the second largest of Saturn's moons at 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in wavelengths of polarized infrared light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 4, 2007. Cassini acquired the view at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and 679,000 kilometers (422,000 miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 137 kilometers (85 miles) per pixel on Saturn and about 80 kilometers (50 miles) per pixel on Rhea.

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