The Cassini spacecraft views the rugged surface of Mimas—half lit by
the Sun, and half lit by reflected light from Saturn. On the sunlit
western limb lies the great Herschel impact crater.
The view looks toward a region centered on 50 degrees west longitude on
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across). North is up and rotated 9
degrees to the right.
The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 2, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 625,000 kilometers (388,000 miles) from Mimas and at a
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 96 degrees. Image scale is 4
kilometers (2 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.