schneiderism

Definitely a beautiful image of Saturn’s second largest moon, Rhea, with the backdrop of Saturn’s murky atmosphere as Rhea “floats” above it. The black line is Saturn’s ring plane which Cassini has captured essentially head-on, about one degree above the ring plane. This image offers an incredible sense of the scale between Saturn and Rhea.

Found this image here. I have written previously about Saturn’s icy moon Rhea, check it out.

I subscribe to the NASA RSS feed for the Cassini-Huygens mission and just came upon this image taken back on June 10th of this year. This simple black and white image taken by Cassini conveys so much detail about the icy moon. There is the surface, riddled with impact craters and covered in ridges and striations. If you look at the upper right edge of the moon silhoetted against the blackness of space you get a sense of the dimensionality of the moon’s surface. Rhea is the second largest of Saturn’s moons at about 950 miles across, this image definitely gives it presence. Some more detail on Rhea:

• Rhea was discovered in 1642 by Giovanni Cassini, the namesake for the Cassini space probe and the astronomer who also discovered the Saturn moons Iapetus, Dione, and Tethys
• In direct sunlight the temp is as warm as -281°F, and in the shade -364°F
• Rhea has a rocky core that is about one-third of its mass, the rest is water-ice
• It is about 527,000 km from Saturn