Lonely Mimas swings around Saturn, seeming to gaze down at the planet's
splendid rings. The outermost, narrow F ring is visible here and exhibits
some clumpy structure near the bottom of the frame. The shadow of Saturn's
southern hemisphere stretches almost entirely across the rings. Mimas is
398 kilometers (247 miles) wide.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
August 15, 2004, at a distance of 8.8 million kilometers (5.5 million
miles) from Saturn, through a filter sensitive to visible red light. The
image scale is 53 kilometers (33 miles) per pixel. Contrast was slightly
enhanced to aid visibility.
almost entirely across the rings. Mimas is 398 kilometers (247 miles) wide.
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.
