Dark Patch

The ancient and battered surface of Saturn's moon Rhea shows a notable dark swath of territory
near the eastern limb in this image from Cassini.

This view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949
miles across). North is up and tilted 40 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 7, 2005,
through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The
view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from
Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Resolution in the original
image was 10 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and
magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute,
Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . For
additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute