PIA12760: Look-alike Moons


Look-alike Moons

Caption:

Rhea and Dione seem like dark and light fraternal twins in this Cassini spacecraft image, with each of these two Saturnian moons displaying a large crater oriented similarly in the northern hemisphere.

Rhea, on the left, is closer to the Cassini spacecraft than Dione in this view. Saturn is out-of-frame, far to the right of this view.

Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) and the leading hemisphere of Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across). North on the moons is up.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 3, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 75 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Dione.

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 Dione, 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 Crater, Grayscale, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2011-04-04
Date in Caption 2011-02-03
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12760
Identifier PIA12760