The Battered Moon Rhea

The battered moon Rhea. Click for a larger version (~96k) Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This Cassini image highlights just how battered the Saturn moon Rhea really is.  There is more than what I thought.  Clicking the image will bring up a larger version and shows some nice detail.

From the Cassini site:

Craters imprinted upon other craters record the long history of impacts endured by Saturn’s moon Rhea.
This view looks toward the mid-southern latitudes of the Saturn-facing side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 262 meters (860 feet) 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.

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