The Cassini spacecraft zooms in on Mimas, pitted by craters and slightly
out-of-round. Cassini images taken during a flyby of Mimas in August 2005
were compiled into a movie showing the moon's battered surface up close
(see PIA07710).
This view shows the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Mimas (397 kilometers, or
247 miles across). North is up and rotated 24 degrees to the left. The
moon's night side is dimly lit by saturnshine, which is sunlight reflected
by the planet.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 25, 2006 at a distance of approximately
552,000 kilometers (343,000 miles) from Mimas and at a
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 106 degrees. Image scale is 3
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.