In this view, Saturn's moon Mimas is a mere pinprick of light, while the
nearly edge-on rings and the ghostly globe of Saturn steal the scene. Some
of the light reflected from the rings bounces onto Saturn and faintly
illuminates the planet's southern hemisphere. The strongly lit part of
Saturn in the lower right is lit by direct sunlight. Northward of the
equator, the planet is largely invisible.
Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Sept. 11, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.3
million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is
about 140 kilometers (87 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
