The Cassini spacecraft imaged Rhea, on Feb. 26, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometres. The surface is heavily bombarded, and the large Tirawa impact basin is visible.
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This view looks toward the leading hemisphere on Rhea. North is up. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 106 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometres per pixel.
Rhea transits the face of Saturn, whose darkened rings and their shadows appear near upper right. Rhea is the second largest of Saturn's moons at 1,528 kilometres across. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ring plane.
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Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural colour view. The view was acquired with the wide-angle camera on Feb. 4, 2007. Cassini acquired the view at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometres from Saturn and 679,000 kilometres from Rhea. Image scale is 68 kilometres per pixel on Saturn and about 40 kilometres per pixel on Rhea.
Rhea displays a marked colour contrast from north to south that is particularly easy to see in the extreme colour-enhanced Cassini spacecraft view presented here. A clear filter image is also presented (left) alongside the colour composite (right). To create the false-colour view, ultraviolet, green and infrared images were combined into a single picture that isolates and maps regional colour differences. This "colour map" was then superimposed over a clear-filter image that preserves the relative brightness across the body. The combination of colour map and brightness image shows how colours vary across the surface of Rhea. The origin of the colour differences is not yet understood, but may be caused by subtle differences in the surface composition or the sizes of grains making up the icy surface material.
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This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere on Rhea. The view shows southerly latitudes on Rhea, down to the South Pole. North is up and rotated 17 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately 457,000 kilometres from Rhea. Image scale is 3 kilometres per pixel.
Side-by-side natural colour and false-colour views highlight the wispy terrain on Rhea's trailing hemisphere. The extreme false colour image makes it clear that the wisps -- likely networks of fractures as on Dione -- cut across older, cratered terrain. In addition, a set of thin, north-south trending lineaments (also likely fractures) is visible on the left side of both views. The natural colour view was created by compositing images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters.
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The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2007 at a distance of approximately 597,000 kilometres from Rhea. Image scale is 4 kilometres per pixel.
This view looks toward Rhea's north polar region, where icy fractures point towards the south. The Lit terrain in this view is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Rhea.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 4, 2006 at a distance of approximately 773,000 kilometres from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometres per pixel.
This global digital map of Saturn's moon Rhea was created using data taken during NASA's Cassini and Voyager spacecraft flybys. The map is an equidistant projection and has a scale of 700 metres per pixel. Equidistant projections preserve distances on a body, with some distortion of area and direction.
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The mean radius of Rhea used for projection of this map is 764 kilometres. This map is an update to the version released in December 2005.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 756,000 kilometres from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 49 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometres per pixel.