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Rhea, Rings and Shadow

Aug. 11, 2010
Saturn's moon Rhea is gently lit in front of a background of the planet with a wide shadow cast by the rings which are seen nearly edge-on in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Saturn's moon Rhea is gently lit in front of a background of the planet with a wide shadow cast by the rings which are seen nearly edge-on.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) and toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 8, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Rhea and at a sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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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