The dim, unlit side of Saturn's rings hides a secret in this view. Shy
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) can be seen peeking out from
behind the rings below center.
The bright features in this scene, including the F ring along the rings'
periphery, are regions where tiny, dust-sized particles scatter light
toward the camera. This phenomenon is often seen at high phase angles --
that is, Sun-ring-spacecraft angles -- approaching 180 degrees.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 3, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.2
million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Mimas and phase angle of 161
degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.
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.