Cassini caught this glimpse of Saturn's second largest moon, 1,528 kilometer (949 mile) wide Rhea on Aug. 16, 2004. Notable in the image is a brightening near the terminator.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a distance of 8.5 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 86 degrees. The image scale is 51 kilometers (32 miles) per pixel. The image has been enhanced and magnified by a factor of four 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 Cassini-Huygens 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
