CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Background Planet

Rhea drifts in front of Saturn. The battered, icy moon is seen here near the western limb of the planet's northern hemisphere.

This image was taken eight hours after PIA09841. The view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 576,000 kilometers (358,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 12 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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: February 25, 2008 (Happy 65th Birthday, George Harrison!) (PIA 09844)
Image/Caption Information 		  Background Planet
PIA 09844
Avg Rating: 8.76/10

Full Size 966x941:
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Alliance Member Comments
Red_dragon (Feb 29, 2008 at 7:43 AM):
Superb stuff, thanks again to the perspective given to the NAC.