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Diversity of Impacts

July 11, 2005
Saturn's moon Rhea displays two large impact features here, along the terminator (the boundary between day and night), plus a superb rayed crater to the east. This image was taken in visible light with NASA's Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera.

Saturn's moon Rhea displays two large impact features here, along the terminator (the boundary between day and night), plus a superb rayed crater to the east. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

The northern basin, named Tirawa, was discovered in Voyager images. This ancient impact site is approximately 360 kilometers (220 miles) across. Another, perhaps larger basin sits to the south of Tirawa and is partly in shadow.

This view shows principally the leading hemisphere on Rhea; north is up and rotated about 10 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 2, 2005, 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 47 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.

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. For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.

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