Reflecting on Icy Rhea

Bright sunlight on Rhea shows off the cratered surface of Saturn's second largest moon.

See Ancient Plains of Rhea and Bright Rays to learn more about this moon.

Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing side of Rhea. North on Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is up.

Scale in the original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 21, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 40 degrees.

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