CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Shine On Crazy Wisps

Bright light reflects off the wispy terrain of Saturn's moon Rhea in this image which looks down on the high northern latitudes of the icy moon.

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Rhea (1528 kilometers, 949 miles across). The north pole lies darkened just to the right of the middle of the terminator. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 19, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 66 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. 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 Equinox Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: April 29, 2009 (PIA 11481)
Image/Caption Information 		  Shine On Crazy Wisps
PIA 11481
Avg Rating: 8.32/10

Full Size 691x691:
JPEG 32 KB
PNG 24 KB
TIFF 478 KB


Alliance Member Comments
mipsandbips (Apr 29, 2009 at 9:20 PM):
From this camera angle it appears as though there are 2 different lines of demarcation, the terminator being the first and the 2nd a lateral line in the center of the image appearing to divide Rhea between a finer surface and a rougher one.