Two moons regard each other across a vast distance in this view from the Cassini
spacecraft.
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across, at bottom) is easily identified by its
prominent crater, Herschel. Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) sits
beyond the rings, appearing almost to rest upon them.
This view was obtained from a perspective nearly edge-on with the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera
on July 6, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million
miles) from Mimas and 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Rhea. Image
scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Mimas and 19 kilometers (12 miles)
per pixel on Rhea.
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.