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April 8th, 2009

Cassini Gets Rhea Rays


Cassini Rhea Rays (NASA) With streaks of icy material thrown in many directions, a huge ray crater stretches across nearly half of the leading hemisphere of Saturn's moon Rhea.

With the sun almost directly behind the spacecraft in this low-phase image, the disk of the moon is almost completely lit for Cassini's camera. Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up and rotated 30 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 3, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 820,000 kilometers (510,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 6 degrees.