Saturn's Moon Rhea - Facts for Kids *new*

Even being the Saturn's second biggest moon doesn't make Rhea very big. We could set three Rheas down on the USA and have room to spare. It whizzes around Saturn so quickly that a month is only four and a half Earth days long. It's so cold there that ice is as hard as rock.

Saturn's Moon Rhea - Facts for Kids

From Space.com, here is an image taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Rhea from a distance of around 280,000 km (174,000 mi). [Image: © NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute]

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Rhea, the second largest moon of Saturn, is a dirty snowball of rock and ice. The only moon with an oxygen atmosphere, thin though it may be, Rhea is one of the most heavily cratered satellites in the solar system.

Here is a natural color photograph of Rhea. Since the same side of Rhea always faces Saturn, one hemisphere always leads as the moon orbits, and the other trails. This image shows the trailing edge.

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It has bright, wispy terrain that is similar in appearance to that of Dione, another one of Saturn's moon. At this distance however, the exact nature of these wispy features is out of the reach of Cassini's cameras.

An enlarged image shows the wispy features better. This terrain is made of bright ice cliffs created by tectonic fractures. (Tectonic fracturing is caused by violent internal activity in the moon.)