Icy Desolation

The Cassini spacecraft surveys the stark beauty of Saturn's moon Rhea.

Rhea's north pole is up and tilted slightly away from Cassini in this view; the moon's south pole is in sunlight at bottom. Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across).

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 10, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 420,000 kilometers (261,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 53 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

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.