Annotated Version
Rhea's surface gains some depth in this stereo image, or anaglyph, which
features the bright and geologically young-looking rayed crater on the
moon's leading hemisphere. The view was created from images taken during
Cassini's close encounter with Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles
across) on Aug. 30, 2007.
The crater is 48 kilometers (30 miles) wide, and its rays extend several
hundred kilometers outward. The rim of this crater is quite sharply
defined, and there are few small craters overprinted onto it. These
characteristics, along with the brightness of the crater and its rays are
indicative of a feature formed relatively recently in geologic history.
The hummocky floor of the crater possesses a central peak and clusters of
small craters. The little craters may be secondary impact sites, formed by
ejecta from the primary impact that landed in the crater, or they could
have been formed by material that had broken off of the body that struck
Rhea.
For an even higher resolution view of this feature, see PIA07764.
This stereo image is a mosaic consisting of seven Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera images. The view is an orthographic projection
centered on 12 degrees south latitude, 112 degrees west longitude and has
a resolution of 45 meters (148 feet) per pixel. An orthographic view is
most like the view seen by a distant observer looking through a telescope.
North is up.
The clear filter images for this stereo image were taken from distances
ranging from about 17,000 kilometers (10,600 miles, for the red-colored
image) to 7,500 kilometers (4,700 miles, for the blue/green-colored image)
from 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. 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
