Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice

Saturn's largest and second largest moons, Titan and Rhea, appear to be stacked on top of each other in this true-color scene from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
The north polar hood can be seen on Titan (3,200 miles or 5,150 kilometers across) appearing as a detached layer at the top of the moon on the top right. See Haze Layers on Titan to learn more about Titan's atmosphere and the north polar hood.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Rhea (949 miles or 1528 kilometers across). North on Rhea is up and rotated 35 degrees to the right.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural-color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 16, 2011, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Rhea and 1.5 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel on Rhea and 9 miles (15 kilometers) on Titan.
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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

view full-res JPG