Cassini Captures New Images of Icy Moon

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jia-rui.c.cook@jpl.nasa.gov

News feature: 2012-069 March 12, 2012

Cassini Captures New Images of Icy Moon

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-069&cid=release_2012-069

These raw, unprocessed images of Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea, were taken on
March 10, 2012, by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This was a relatively distant flyby with a
close-approach distance of 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers), well suited for global geologic
mapping.

During the flyby, Cassini captured these distinctive views of the moon's cratered surface,
creating a 30-frame mosaic of Rhea's leading hemisphere and the side of the moon that
faces away from Saturn. The observations included the large Mamaldi (300 miles, or 480
kilometers, across) and Tirawa (220 miles, or 360 kilometers, across) impact basins and
the 29-kilometer (47-kilometer) ray crater Inktomi, one of the youngest surface features on
Rhea (about 950 miles, or 1,530 kilometers, across).

All of Cassini's raw images can be seen at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/ .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency
and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages the
mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter
and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging
operations team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. JPL is a division of
Caltech.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

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