PIA11512: Sun-bleached Rhea


Sun-bleached Rhea

Caption:

Lit brilliantly by the sun, the moon Rhea shows off its huge ray crater.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 812,000 kilometers (505,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 4 degrees. This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up and rotated 30 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 26, 2009. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) 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 .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Rhea
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Rotation, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2009-06-11
Date in Caption 2009-04-26
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11512
Identifier PIA11512