Soon after orbital insertion, Cassini returned its best look yet at the
heavily cratered moon Mimas (398 kilometers, 247 miles across). The
enormous crater at the top of this image, named Herschel, is about 130
kilometers (80 miles) wide and 10 kilometers (6 miles) deep.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on July 3, 2004, from a distance of 1.7 million kilometers
(1 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase
angle of about 102 degrees. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles)
per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two to aid
visibility.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.
