The great basin that interrupts the contours of this moon's crescent
identifies the satellite unmistakably as Mimas. The giant crater Herschel
(130 kilometers, or 80 miles wide) is this moon's most obvious feature.
North on Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is up and rotated 23
degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Sept. 8, 2006 at a distance of approximately
534,000 kilometers (331,000 miles) from Mimas and at a
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115 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.
