The Cassini spacecraft snaps an excellent view of the leading side of
Mimas and its distinguishing crater, Herschel. The moon's night side is
partly lit by reflected light from Saturn.
North on Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is up and rotated 12
degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Mimas and at
a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 89 degrees. Image scale is 8
kilometers (5 miles) 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
