Having recently rounded the ansa, or outer edge of the rings, Mimas heads
off toward right. This view from the Cassini spacecraft provides a crisp
look at the fine material and detailed structure in the Cassini Division
that is not readily visible from the Earth. The faint F ring, just visible
between Mimas and the A ring, bounds the main rings of Saturn.
Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 4 degrees
below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 7, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 18 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Mimas.
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.