CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
A Real Shiner

A Real Shiner
PIA 06525
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   Saturn's moon Rhea shows off the moon equivalent of a black eye - a bright, rayed crater near its eastern limb.

About half the size of Earth's Moon, Rhea (1528 kilometers, 949 miles across) is the second-largest moon orbiting Saturn. Cassini will again image this hemisphere of Rhea in mid-January 2005 - just after the Huygens probe landing on Titan - with approximately 1 kilometer resolution.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on October 24, 2004, from a distance of about 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 40 degrees. The image scale is approximately 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 22, 2004 (PIA 06525)
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