Rhea Past Rings

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Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft looks past Saturn's rings and small moon Janus to spy the planet's second largest moon, Rhea.

Janus is closest to Cassini here. The rings are between Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) and Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). Lit terrain seen on Rhea is on the leading hemisphere of that moon. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 11, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 3 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Rhea and approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Janus. Image scale is 18 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Rhea. Image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Janus.

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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