Southern terrain on Saturn's moon Rhea is dimly illuminated by Saturnshine in this Cassini spacecraft view of the dark side of the moon.
The spacecraft's camera is looking toward the night side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across), but sunlight reflected off the day side of immense Saturn is bright enough to illuminate the craters seen here. This view is centered on terrain at 23 degrees south latitude, 315 degrees west longitude.
Four background stars are visible.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on August 1, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 113 degrees. Scale in the original image was 800 meters (2,600 feet) per pixel. The image was contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of 1.5 to enhance the visibility of surface features.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
A quintet of Saturn's moons come together in the Cassini spacecraft's field of view for this portrait.
Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is on the far left. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the image. Brightly reflective Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) appears above the center of the image. Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across), is bisected by the right edge of the image. The smaller moon Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) can be seen beyond Rhea also on the right side of the image.
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. Rhea is closest to Cassini here. The rings are beyond Rhea and Mimas. Enceladus is beyond the rings.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Rhea and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Enceladus. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Enceladus.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Impact craters are rare on Titan. Until recently only seven had been identified definitely on Titan, so it was exciting when Cassini's Titan Radar Mapper imaged an eighth impact crater on June 21, 2011. This newly discovered crater is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) in diameter and is surrounded by a continuous blanket of ejecta (material thrown out from the crater) that appears bright to radar and extends roughly 10 to 12 miles (15 to 20 kilometers) beyond the rim. With its well-preserved ejecta and steep inward-facing walls, the new crater resembles the two other freshest known craters on Titan: Sinlap, seen in the radar image of February 2005 (PIA07368), and Ksa, seen in September 2006 (PIA08737) and imaged again in this latest flyby. One difference is that Sinlap and the new crater seem to have flat, largely featureless floors, but Ksa has a bright central peak.
Dunes, visible as dark lines on the left of the image, have been swept toward the crater by the winds of Titan. These dunes have encroached very little onto the bright ejecta, compared to those on Ksa where more than a third of the ejecta blanket on its western edge is covered by dunes.
While Saturn's other moons have many thousands of craters, Titan has very few. One reason is that Titan's dense atmosphere burns up the smaller impacting bodies before they can reach the surface. The craters that do form are often hard to recognize or disappear entirely as they are eroded over time by geological processes such as the wind-driven motion of sand and, possibly, icy volcanism.
This synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) image, centered at 12 degrees north latitude and 45 degrees west longitude, measures 150 miles (242 kilometers) high by 160 miles (257 kilometers) wide, with resolution of about 350 meters per pixel; north is at the top, and the image is illuminated from the bottom. Incidence angle varies from 15 to 25 degrees.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The Cassini spacecraft views the cratered surface of Saturn's moon Tethys in front of the hazy orb of the planet's largest moon, Titan. Tethys (1,062 kilometers, or 660 miles across) is much closer than Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) to Cassini. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan and toward the area between the trailing hemisphere and anti-Saturn side of Tethys. Saturn is out of the frame, far to the left.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 14, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 18 degrees. Image scale is 19 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel on Titan. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 18 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Tethys.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Three of Titan's major surface features-dunes, craters and the enigmatic Xanadu-appear in this radar image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The hazy bright area at the left that extends to the lower center of the image marks the northwest edge of Xanadu, a continent-sized feature centered near the moon's equator. At upper right is the crater Ksa, first seen by Cassini in 2006 (PIA09172). The dark lines running between these two features are linear dunes, similar to sand dunes on Earth in Egypt and Namibia.
The dune fields on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, nearly girdle the globe at latitudes from about 30 degrees north to 30 degrees south, with the notable exception of Xanadu. In this image, the dunes overlap Xanadu only slightly. They are also more widely separated and discontinuous at the boundary, a characteristic typical of dunes on Earth where the sand supply is limited. The dunes also either wind their way around or terminate at other, smaller features, including Ksa.
Cassini's Titan Radar Mapper acquired this synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) image, centered at 11 degrees north latitude and 74 degrees west longitude, on June 21, 2011. The image covers an area 350 kilometers (217 miles) high by 930 kilometers (578 miles) wide, with resolution of about 350 meters per pixel. North is at the top, and the image is illuminated from the top. Incidence angle varies from 15 to 30 degrees.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL
