Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and Mimas, closer but much smaller on the
right, are seen together in this view from Cassini. Titan's gravity is weaker
than Earth's, so the moon's atmosphere is quite extended --- a quality hinted
at in this view.
Part of Mimas' dark side is illuminated by reflected light from nearby
Saturn.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 3, 2005, at a distance of approximately 3.6
million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Titan (5,150 kilometers, or
3,200 miles across) and 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across). Both moons are seen at a
Sun-moon-spacecraft angle, or phase angle, of 110 degrees. The image
scale is 22 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Titan and 15 kilometers (9
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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
