NASA Cassini Saturn Image: Crater Comparison
This view of Saturn’s moon Rhea includes two large and ancient impact basins and a more recent, bright ray crater.
The large basin above center is named Tirawa. This feature (and the similar-sized crater to its left) is overprinted by many other craters, meaning it is an extremely old feature that has collected other impacts over the eons. For a high-resolution view of the bright ray crater, see Catch That Crater.
This bright ray crater appears to be a younger feature, as it possesses crisp edges, is not heavily overprinted by other craters, and the blanket of bright, fresh material thrown out by the impact is still visible.
Lit terrain seen here is on the moon’s anti-Saturn side. North on Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is toward the top of the image. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 13, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 889,000 kilometers (552,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 31 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
