PIA14654: Rhea's Record


Rhea’s Record

Caption:

The surface of Saturn's moon Rhea bears witness to its violent history. Each crater seen here records an impact in the moon's past.

On some of Rhea's terrains, craters are so densely packed that they lie on top of each other, newer impacts often erasing the older craters. Rhea is 949 miles, or 1,528 kilometers across.

This view is centered on terrain at 38 degrees north latitude, 290 degrees west longitude. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 22, 2012.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 19,000 miles (31,000 kilometers) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Image scale is 600 feet (183 meters) 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 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
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Impact, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2013-03-25
Date in Caption 2012-12-22
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA14654
Identifier PIA14654