Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

As the first artificial satellite in the Saturn system, Cassini returned images of its native siblings following a successful insertion into orbit, including this unmagnified view of Rhea (1528 kilometres, 950 miles across). Rhea is Saturn's second largest moon, and like Dione, the Voyager spacecraft found one of its hemispheres to covered with bright, wispy streaks which may be water frost.

This view shows a heavily cratered surface, and thus it is most likely an ancient one. Many of the craters visible here have central peaks. Cassini soon will look for clues to help unlock the moon's geologic history. The spacecraft is slated to fly by Rhea at a distance of only 500 kilometres (311 miles) on November 26th, 2005.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on July 2nd, 2004, from a distance of about 990,000 kilometres (615,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 109°. The image scale is 6 kilometres (4 miles) per pixel.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

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