Cassini's close up of the surface of the Saturn moon Rhea. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

A combo post of sorts because one thing has nothing to do with the other . . .

I was going to post about the ISS essentially being abandoned, but I’m not sure that’s really the case. Three of the staff aboard are coming home tomorrow and there have been rumors of the remainder returning in a couple of months if the space station cannot be resupplied by the end of November. Then I hear the Russians have scheduled manned flights for November 12th and December 20th with an unmanned cargo ship on October 30th. So I’m not totally sure of what is happening.

All the speculation stems from the loss of a unmanned Soyuz carrying cargo to the ISS prompting Russia to cancel all manned flights pending an investigation in to the mishap. Can’t find fault with that decision and with the demise of the shuttle program, well there you go, the whole thing isn’t too far a field from being halted.

So the image, well that’s a good close shot of a battered Rhea taken by Cassini from 12,000 miles (20,000 km).

From the Cassini website:

In this image obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on its closest flyby of Saturn’s moon Rhea, the heavily cratered surface of the moon appears in great detail. Just to the bottom right of the center of this image, a bright area appears to indicate a freshly excavated double crater. Double craters can appear when two gravitationally linked asteroids crash into a surface. This image was obtained by Cassini’s narrow-angle camera on Jan. 11, 2011, from a distance of about 20,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) away.