The Cassini spacecraft spies the icy moon Mimas on the far side of
Saturn's rings. The large crater Herschel gives the moon a flattened
profile on its leading hemisphere, at left.
This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Mimas (396 kilometers, or
246 miles across). North is up and rotated 30 degrees to the left.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible green light
with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 22, 2008. The view
was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers
(831,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 16 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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.