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Rhea and Rings

Sept. 23, 2009
Beyond the ansa of Saturn's rings, a crescent Rhea completes this ring-and-moon composition captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Beyond the ansa of Saturn's rings, a crescent Rhea completes this ring-and-moon composition.

Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is near the middle of the bottom of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 4 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 24, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (994,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 137 degrees. Image scale is 95 kilometers (59 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.

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