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March 27th, 2009

Cassini Crater Captures


Cassini crater captures The terminator between light and dark throws Saturn's moon Rhea's cratered surface into stark relief while the southern hemisphere is scored by bright icy cliffs.

North on Rhea is up and rotated 42 degrees to the right in this 2-tile mosaic. This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Rhea (1528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 2, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 181,000 kilometers (112,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 91 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (3,300 feet) per pixel. 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 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.