Mimas and Dione

Mimas and Dione
May 9, 2005
PIA NumberPIA06644
Language
  • english

Saturn's moon Mimas poses with the larger moon Dione in this handsome portrait. The wispy fractured terrain of Dione's trailing side is visible here. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across, while Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Mimas and 18 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Dione.

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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute