Photo Of The Day

Saturn's moon Rhea is gently lit in front of a background of the planet with a wide shadow cast by the rings which are seen nearly edge-on.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) and toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 8, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Rhea and at a sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.

August 11th, 2011

NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute