Rings and Rhea

Rhea's trailing hemisphere shows off its wispy terrain on the left of this image which includes Saturn's rings in the distance.

See PIA09895 to learn more about Rhea's terrain. In this image, the moon is closer to Cassini than the rings are. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up and rotated 1 degree to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 4, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 762,000 kilometers (473,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 74 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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.