Rhea brushes the stormy face of Saturn, an airless ice orb
against the feathery bands of a gas giant. Saturn's
unilluminated rings are seen at upper right. Rhea is the second
largest of Saturn's moons at 1,528 kilometers (949 miles)
across. This view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from
about 3 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in
wavelengths of polarized infrared light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 4, 2007. Cassini acquired
the view at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers
(700,000 miles) from Saturn and 679,000 kilometers (422,000
miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 137 kilometers (85 miles) per
pixel on Saturn and about 80 kilometers (50 miles) per pixel on
Rhea. 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.