Shine On Crazy Wisps

Bright light reflects off the wispy terrain of Saturn's moon Rhea in this image which looks down on the high northern latitudes of the icy moon.

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). The north pole lies darkened just to the right of the middle of the terminator. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 19, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 66 degrees. 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