Four minutes after Cassini captured dark Mimas and softly-lit Enceladus
(see PIA08220) near the ringplane, Mimas had slipped into near-obscurity
against Saturn's dark side.
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is still visible as a dark
spot just right of the planet's limb, leaving Enceladus (505 kilometers,
or 314 miles across) to bask in the ghostly light of Saturn.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9
million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Mimas, 4.3 kilometers (2.7
miles) from Enceladus, and 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 25 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel on Saturn.
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.
