Rhea’s Bright Wisps

Wispy markings reach out across Rhea's surface from its trailing hemisphere. The bright markings appear to be fractures, like those found on Dione.

This view looks toward the northern hemisphere on Rhea's trailing side. North on Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is up and rotated about 40 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 1, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 54 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 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