Orb of Ice

A serene orb of ice is set against the gentle pastel clouds of giant Saturn. Rhea transits the face of the gas giant, whose darkened rings and their planet-hugging shadows appear near upper right.

Rhea is the second largest of Saturn's moons at 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ring plane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The view was acquired with the wide-angle camera on Feb. 4, 2007. Cassini acquired the view at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn and 679,000 kilometers (422,000 miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 68 kilometers (42 miles) per pixel on Saturn and about 40 kilometers (25 miles) per pixel on Rhea.

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.