The sun's low angle near the terminator throws the craters of Mimas into
stark relief.
This view looks toward high northern latitudes on Mimas (396 kilometers,
or 246 miles across) from a position 72 degrees north of the moon's
equator. The north pole is in darkness at center.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 4, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 153,000 kilometers (95,000 miles) from Mimas and at a
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 106 degrees. Image scale is 918
meters (3,011 feet) per pixel.
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, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
