Beyond the expanse of the rings sits Saturn's innermost large moon, Mimas.
The rim of the large crater Herschel is visible as a flattening of the
moon's leading side, at left.
The view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 6
degrees above the ringplane. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 18, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance
of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (989,000 miles) from Mimas. Image
scale is 10 kilometers (6 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.