Mimas in Hiding

Four minutes after Cassini captured dark Mimas and softly-lit Enceladus (see Light from Many Paths) near the ringplane, Mimas had slipped into near-obscurity against Saturn's dark side.

Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is still visible as a dark spot just right of the planet's limb, leaving Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) to bask in the ghostly light of Saturn.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Mimas, 4.3 kilometers (2.7 miles) from Enceladus, and 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 25 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel on Saturn.

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