This movie was made of narrow-angle images taken over a period of seven hours during Cassini's close encounter with Saturn's moon Mimas on Aug. 2, 2005.
In the movie the moon appears to rotate through about 115 degrees and the range varies from 253,000 to 64,000 kilometers (158,000 to 40,000 miles). The image scale in the final pan across the surface is about 760 meters (about 2,500 feet) 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .
