Color on Rhea?

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Caption:

This false-color picture of Saturn's moon Rhea from Cassini enhances slight differences in natural color across the moon's face. The extreme north and south latitudes have a notable difference in hue compared to the mid-latitudes.

This view of Rhea is a composite of images taken using filters sensitive to green (centered at 568 nanometers) and infrared light (two infrared filters, centered at 752 and 930 nanometers) and has been processed to accentuate subtle color differences.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle-camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 890,000 kilometers (553,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 116 degrees. The 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .

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