Cutting Off Rhea

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Caption:

Saturn's rings and small moon Prometheus obscure the Cassini spacecraft's view of the planet's second largest moon, Rhea.

Prometheus, which orbits in the Roche Division between the main rings and the thin F ring, can be seen just below the center of the image, in front of Rhea. Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) and mostly on the leading hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across).

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 9, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (621,000 miles) from Prometheus and 1.6 million kilometers (994,000 miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Prometheus and 10 kilometers (6 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/ . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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