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Crescents Large and Small

Sept. 22, 2010
A small crescent of the moon Rhea is dwarfed by the larger crescent of Saturn in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Rhea can be seen in the upper right of the image.

A small crescent of the moon Rhea is dwarfed by the larger crescent of Saturn.

Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) can be seen in the upper right of the image. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 3 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 15, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 98 degrees. Image scale is 153 kilometers (95 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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