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Rings, Rhea and Telesto

Oct. 18, 2010
NASA's Cassini spacecraft composition features Saturn's rings (top of image), its second largest moon, Rhea (on right of image), and one of the planet's tiny moons, Telesto (near the middle of image) appears as a bright speck.

This Cassini spacecraft composition features Saturn's rings, its second largest moon, Rhea, and one of the planet's tiny moons, Telesto.

Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is on the right. Telesto (25 kilometers, or 16 miles across) is near the middle of the image and appears as a bright speck. Saturn's rings are at the top of the image. The rings and Telesto have been brightened by a factor 1.6 relative to Rhea.

This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from just below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 5, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (994,000 miles) from Telesto and 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Telesto and 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Rhea.

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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