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Nov. 20, 2008
Saturn's moon Mimas's lit crescent has the appearance of a golf ball thanks to its heavily cratered surface in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Oct. 24, 2008.

Mimas's lit crescent has the appearance of a golf ball thanks to its heavily cratered surface.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 24, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 189,000 kilometers (117,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 136 degrees. Image scale is about 1 kilometer (3,707 feet) 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.

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