NASA: Cassini spacecraft has always awed space enthusiasts with enlightening images of its numerous flybys of the planet Saturn and its moons.

NASA just released a beautiful image of Rhea, which appeared to be dazzlingly bright in full sunlight. This is the signature of the water ice that forms most of the moon’s surface.

Rhea (949 miles or 1,527 kilometers across) is Saturn’s second largest moon after Titan. Its ancient surface is one of the most heavily cratered of all of Saturn’s moons. Subtle albedo variations across the disk of Rhea hint at past geologic activity.

Explaining the image in detail, NASA reported that, this view looks toward the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Rhea. North on Rhea is up and rotated 36 degrees to the right. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2016, using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 365,000 miles (587,000 kilometers) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, an angle of 9 degrees. Image scale is 2.4 miles (3.9 kilometers) per pixel.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004, where it released the Huygens probe that touched landed on the moon Titan in early 2005. The $3.2 billion Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint effort by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Cassini’s mission will end in 2017 with the spacecraft being intentionally crashed into the ringed planet.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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, Washington.