As the closest-orbiting of Saturn's intermediate-sized moons, Mimas is
occasionally captured against the planet's dim and shadowed northern
latitudes. The moon is seen here next to the shadows cast by the dense B
ring. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
July 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1
million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 90 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
