Dark Patch

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Caption:

The ancient and battered surface of Saturn's moon Rhea shows a notable dark swath of territory near the eastern limb in this image from Cassini.

This view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North is up and tilted 40 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 7, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 10 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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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