Saturday, April 14, 2012


Rhea Before Titan
Craters appear well defined on icy Rhea in front of the hazy orb of the much larger moon Titan in this Cassini–Huygens spacecraft view of these two Saturn's moons.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemispheres of Rhea and Titan. North on the moons is up and rotated 13 degrees to the left. The limb, or edge of the visible disk, of Rhea is slightly overexposed in this view.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 10, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 810,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109 degrees. Image scale is 8 miles (12 kilometers) per pixel on Titan and 5 miles (8 kilometers) per pixel on Rhea.

More on Rhea - http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/moons/rhea/
More on Titan - http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/index.cfm?SciencePageID=73

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA the European Space Agency, ESA and the Italian Space Agency. 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 and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org/.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute