Ragged Crescent

Rhea's devastated surface creates a jagged terminator as mountains and crater rims break-up the line between day and night. Terrain on Rhea's night side is dimly lit by reflected light from Saturn.

The view looks toward the southern hemisphere on the moon's trailing side. North on Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is up.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 22, 2006 at a distance of approximately 263,000 kilometers (164,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 138 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (about 1 mile) 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