CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Rhea in Profile

Rhea in Profile
PIA 07642
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   Gray and barren Rhea drifts beneath Saturn's more colorful rings. Bright wispy markings on the trailing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) are just visible curling along the western limb.

Above the icy moon, Saturn's shadow darkens the ringplane.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this color image, which approximates what the human eye might see. The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees. North on Rhea is up. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: November 30, 2005 (PIA 07642)
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