The great eye of Saturn's moon Mimas, a 130-kilometer-wide (80-mile)
impact crater called Herschel, stares out from the battered moon. Several
individual ringlets within the F ring are resolved here, and the small
moon Atlas is also seen faintly outside the main rings.
Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles across); the view shows principally
the moon's anti-Saturn hemisphere. Atlas is 32 kilometers (20 miles)
across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 5, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.1
million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Mimas and at a
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. The image scale is
13 kilometers (8 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.
