Half-Moon

This half-lit view beautifully captures the ponderously old and cratered surface of Saturn's icy moon Rhea. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

The sunlit terrain shown here is on the moon's leading hemisphere, on the side of Rhea that always faces toward Saturn. North is up and rotated 20 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 21, 2005, at a distance of approximately 922,000 kilometers (573,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 88 degrees. The image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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