CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Dark Patch

Rhea's ancient and battered surface shows a notable dark swath of territory near the eastern limb in this image from Cassini.

This view shows principally the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across). North is up and tilted 40 degrees to the right.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera on March 7, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired from a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 30 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 10 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two 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: April 19, 2005 (PIA 06630)
Image/Caption Information 		  Dark Patch
PIA 06630
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