Well Lit Rhea

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Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the cratered plains of the trailing hemisphere of Rhea.

Some of the moon's fractures, appearing like wispy bright lines, can be seen on the left of the image. Rhea's north pole is up and rotated 3 degrees to the right. The moon is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 21, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 30,000 kilometers (19,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27 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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