PIA11550: Low Contrast Rhea


Low Contrast Rhea

Caption:

The battered features of the moon Rhea, seen at low phase, appear washed out by the sun.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Rhea at a sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 15 degrees. To see Rhea at an even lower phase angle -- near opposition -- see PIA10542 .

North on Rhea (1528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is up and rotated 7 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 26, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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 Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Planet
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Rotation, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2009-08-04
Date in Caption 2009-05-26
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11550
Identifier PIA11550