High Above Mimas

Mimas
April 15, 2008
PIA NumberPIA09880
Language
  • english

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the high north on heavily cratered Mimas. The unmistakable Herschel impact crater is seen at lower left.

Lit terrain seen here is on the anti-Saturn side of Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across).

The moon's north pole is up and tilted slightly toward Cassini. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 11, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 795,000 kilometers (494,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 88 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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