Quick Passage

Mimas briefly slipped in front of Tethys while the Cassini spacecraft looked on and captured the event in this series of images.

The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 11, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.7 million kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Mimas and 4.1 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Tethys. Resolution in the original images was 22 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) and 25 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel on Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across). The images have been magnified by a factor of two.

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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute