This amazing perspective view captures battered Mimas against the hazy
limb of Saturn.
It is obvious in such close-up images that Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247
miles across) has been badly scarred by impacts over the eons. Its 130
kilometer- (80 mile-) wide crater, Herschel, lies in the darkness at
right.
North on Mimas is up and rotated 19 degrees to the right.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 21, 2006 using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet
light centered at 338 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of
approximately 191,000 kilometers (119,000 miles) from Mimas and at a
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 91 degrees. Image scale is 1
kilometer (3,730 feet) 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.