Rhea in Profile

Gray and barren Rhea drifts beneath Saturn's more colorful rings. Bright wispy markings on the trailing hemisphere of Rhea are just visible curling along the western limb.

Above the icy moon, Saturn's shadow darkens the ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this color image, which approximates what the human eye might see. The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees. North on Rhea is up. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

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