The oblate shape of Mimas is presented in this Cassini spacecraft image.
The moon appears flattened at the poles with an equatorial bulge.
To learn more about this small moon, see PIA07534. Herschel Crater, seen
on the left, is 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, wide.
This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Mimas (396 kilometers, or
246 miles across). North on Mimas is up and rotated 44 degree to the left.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on June 25, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 594,000 kilometers (369,000 miles) from Mimas and at a
Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 11 degrees. Image scale is 4
kilometers (2 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.