Cassini looked toward the night side of Saturn to spy the darkened orb of
Mimas barely visible here near the center of the image hugging the
planet's shadow. To the left of Mimas are several bright features in the
faint D ring.
The innermost of Saturn's medium-sized icy moons, Mimas, is 397 kilometers
(247 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 7, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9
million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Mimas and 4 million kilometers
(2.5 million miles) from Saturn. The Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle
is 161 degrees. Image scale is 24 kilometers (15 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.
