In Orbit with Rhea

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Caption:

Shadow-striped Saturn and its exquisitely thin rings occupy the near-field view in this Cassini image, while a crescent moon Rhea hangs in the distance.

A couple of bright pixels at the center of the image mark the location of the tiny moon Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across).

As Saturn's second-largest moon, Rhea is 1,528 kilometers wide (949 miles).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 3, 2006, at a distance of approximately 4.1 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Saturn and 4.6 million kilometers (2.9 million miles) from Rhea. The image scale is 28 kilometers (17 miles) per pixel on Rhea.

Background Info:

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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