On its first orbit of the ringed planet, the Cassini spacecraft gazed into
the distance to capture this image of the icy moon Mimas (398 kilometers
or 247 miles wide). The faint F ring is visible as the outermost strand
of the rings in this view.
The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on
August 16, 2004, at a distance of 8.9 million kilometers (5.5 million
miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 53 kilometers (33 miles) per
pixel. Contrast was slightly enhanced 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.
