Edge of Tirawa

This perspective view shows the western half of Rhea's second largest impact basin, Tirawa. This ancient impact basin is 370 kilometers across and roughly 6 kilometers deep. The broad arcuate scarp cutting across scene center is the battered rim of Tirawa. The floor of Tirawa, at right, is heavily cratered, indicating it formed in ancient times when a comet around 30-40 kilometer wide struck Rhea. The two large craters just beyond the rim are 55 and 60 kilometers across. This view was created using stereo topography generated by Dr. Paul Schenk (http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lpi/schenk/) of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston Texas from Cassini imaging data returned in 2008. Although enhanced, the color in this view is an approximation of what we might actually see.

The raw data from which this product was developed were retrieved from the Planetary Data System's Cassini archives. 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. (http://ciclops.org) Data processing for this image was performed at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.