CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Mottled Rhea

Mottled Rhea
PIA 06559
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   Impact-battered Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) exhibits a mottled appearance in this Cassini image. On an ancient surface such as this, large impact basins are often peppered with many smaller craters. The image shows principally the trailing hemisphere of this icy moon, Saturn's second largest.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on December 9, 2004, from a distance of 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 60 degrees. The image scale is about 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast enhanced to aid visibility.

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: January 10, 2005 (PIA 06559)
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