The Herschel crater dominates this view of Saturn's moon Mimas.
The 130-kilometer, or 80-mile, wide crater is located in the middle
latitudes of Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across).
The most brightly lit terrain seen here, lit by the sun, is on the leading
hemisphere of the moon. Light reflected from Saturn dimly lights the other
side of the moon. This view is centered on terrain at 37 degrees north
latitude, 300 degrees west longitude. The north pole of Mimas lies on the
terminator about a quarter of the way inward from the top of the image.
Scale in the original image was 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The
image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid
visibility. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2009. The view was obtained at a
distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from
Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 119 degrees.
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.