Rhea Beyond the Rings

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Caption:

Crater-scarred Rhea floats in the distance, peeking out from behind Saturn's partly shadowed rings. This view looks upward from just beneath the ringplane. The far side of the rings is masked by Saturn's shadow. The north pole of Rhea is obscured by part of the A ring and the sharply defined F ring.

A few bright wispy markings curl around the eastern limb of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 22, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Rhea. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Rhea.

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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