Closed Caption Animation
Mimas, a little moon of Saturn with a big crater, is the star of this
movie. This movie consists of 37 individual frames taken over 20 minutes,
while Cassini remained sharply pointed at the icy worldlet. Mimas is 397
kilometers (247 miles) across.
On the right-hand, or eastern, limb of the moon is the distinctive
profile of the 130 kilometer-wide (80-mile) crater Herschel, for which
Mimas is well-known (see PIA06582). The crater takes up a large
portion of the moon's surface and makes the central part of the limb
appear flattened from this viewing angle.
Mimas appears to rotate very slightly in this sequence of images, as the
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or 'phase,' angle changes from 87 to 88 degrees.
Mimas always presents the same hemisphere toward Saturn so that, like our
Moon, the length of its day is the same as the period it takes to orbit
its planet (approximately 22.5 hours for Mimas).
The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately
1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Mimas. The image scale
is approximately 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
