Bright Rays

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Caption:

Rhea's bright ray crater features prominently in this southern view. The feature is surrounded by bright ejecta—material thrown outward by the impact that formed the crater.

The view looks toward high southern latitudes on Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) from a perspective 49 degrees below the icy moon's equator. Rhea's south pole is at bottom center.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 413,000 kilometers (257,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 44 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel.

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

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