A dual view of Saturn's icy moon Rhea marked the official return of the spacecraft to the planet's satellites. For the last two years, Cassini has been orbiting high above the poles. Aside from regular flybys of Titan, the spacecraft and the satellites were kept apart, according to a press release.
For the remainder of 2015, Cassini will stay mainly equatorial and have four close encounters with Titan, two with Dione and three with the geyser-moon Enceladus.
The two shots of Rhea were taken an hour and a half apart on Feb. 9. At that time, Cassini was 30,000 to 50,000 miles (50,000 to 80,000 kilometers) away from the moon. Cassini began orbiting the equator again on March 16. The images use a range of color visible to the human eye to discern subtle variations of the surface, but in reality, the surface of Rhea is "fairly uniform," according to the press release.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in Pasadena. The Cassini imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
