Mimas and the Great Division

Having recently rounded the ansa, or outer edge of the rings, Mimas heads off toward right. This view from the Cassini spacecraft provides a crisp look at the fine material and detailed structure in the Cassini Division that is not readily visible from the Earth. The faint F ring, just visible between Mimas and the A ring, bounds the main rings of Saturn.

Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 4 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 7, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 18 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Mimas.

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