NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took this raw, unprocessed image of Saturn’s moon Rhea on March 10, 2012. The camera was pointing toward Rhea at 26,019 miles (41,873 kilometers) away.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

Saturn’s battered, icy moon Rhea comes into sharper focus in a new set of snapshots from a robotic NASA probe.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft snapped the raw, unprocessed pictures on March 10 while making a flyby of Rhea with a closest approach of about 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers). During the flyby, Cassini snapped three different views of the moon’s cratered surface, creating a mosaic of Rhea’s leading hemisphere and the side of the moon that faces away from Saturn, researchers said.

Cassini’s observations captured several huge impact basins, including one known as Mamaldi that’s 300 miles (480 km) across and another, called Tirawa, that is 220 miles (360 km) wide.

Rhea is Saturn’s second-largest moon, with a diameter of 949 miles (1528 km). It’s far smaller than the ringed planet’s largest natural satellite, Titan, which at 3,200 miles (5,150 km) across is nearly 50 percent wider than Earth’s moon.

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