This Cassini image shows a nearly half-full Mimas (a moon that is 398
kilometers, or 247 miles, across) beyond Saturn's rings. The image was
contrast-enhanced to make visible the reflected light from Saturn that
illuminates the dark side of Mimas and to improve the visibility of the
faint F ring.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Sept. 11, 2004, at a distance of 8.9 million kilometers
(5.5 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 83 degrees. The image scale is 53 kilometers (33 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras,
were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based
at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.