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Rough, Icy Mimas

Jan. 9, 2008
On Dec. 2, 1007, NASA's Cassini spacecraft viewed the rugged surface of Mimas, half lit by the Sun, and half lit by reflected light from Saturn. On the sunlit western limb lies the great Herschel impact crater.

The Cassini spacecraft views the rugged surface of Mimas—half lit by the Sun, and half lit by reflected light from Saturn. On the sunlit western limb lies the great Herschel impact crater.

The view looks toward a region centered on 50 degrees west longitude on Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across). North is up and rotated 9 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in polarized green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 2, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 625,000 kilometers (388,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 96 degrees. Image scale is 4 kilometers (2 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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