The narrow and twisted F ring lights up this scene, which features Mimas
against the unlit side of Saturn's ringplane. The F ring contains a great
deal of fine, icy particles that are quite effective at scattering
sunlight at high phase angles.
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is seen as a mere crescent in
the center of this haunting view.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 13, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9
million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Mimas and at a
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 156 degrees. Image scale is 23
kilometers (15 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.
