The Saturn moon Mimas is much smaller than Rhea, but the geometry of this
scene exaggerates the actual differences in size. Here, Mimas is on the
opposite side of the rings from Rhea and Cassini. Mimas' diameter is 397
kilometers (247 miles), while Rhea's diameter is 1,528 kilometers (949
miles).
Saturn's shadow slices across the ringplane here. The view looks toward
the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Mimas, and the anti-Saturn hemisphere on
Rhea.
The image was taken in visible light with the narrow-angle camera on Sept.
9, 2005, from a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (900,000
miles) from Rhea. Mimas was located on the far side of the rings, about
670,000 kilometers (420,000 miles) farther from Cassini. The image scale
is 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 13 kilometers (8 miles)
per pixel on Mimas.
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.
