Sleek Rings, Rugged Moon

Rhea floats below the innermost regions of Saturn's amazing rings. This view of the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) allows a glimpse of the wispy terrain that covers the trailing hemisphere of Rhea.

(See Impact Central & Rhea in Natural Color for similar views of the wispy terrain.)

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Oct. 9, 2005, 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 51 degrees. The image scale is 12 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