On Opposing Sides

Two moons regard each other across a vast distance in this view from the Cassini spacecraft.

Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across, at bottom) is easily identified by its prominent crater, Herschel. Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) sits beyond the rings, appearing almost to rest upon them.

This view was obtained from a perspective nearly edge-on with the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 6, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Mimas and 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Rhea. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel on Mimas and 19 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel on Rhea.

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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.