Thursday, June 23, 2005

New Rhea Image: Rhea's Memory


CICLOPS has released this view of Rhea's leading hemisphere (the large crater at the 3:30 position is likely Djuli, I think...). As you can see from this image, taken from a distance of 1.4 million km on May 5 with a resolution of 9 km/pixel, Rhea is a heavily cratered world with nowhere the level of tectonic resurfacing as on Enceladus or even Dione. Given its ancient surface, Rhea could hold the key to understand the impactor population throughout the history of Saturn system where worlds like Enceladus have completely wiped clean the earliest craters.

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