A Major Hit

The Cassini spacecraft snaps an excellent view of the leading side of Mimas and its distinguishing crater, Herschel. The moon's night side is partly lit by reflected light from Saturn.

North on Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is up and rotated 12 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 89 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute