Mimas Before Saturn

Against a background of muted atmospheric bands in Saturn's northern hemisphere, Mimas forges onward in its orbit around the Ringed Planet.

Aside from the large crater Herschel (139 kilometers, or 87 miles across), all features on Mimas are named after people and places in Arthurian legend or the legends of the Titans. In fact, the largest crater near the terminator in this view is named Arthur (64 kilometers, or 40 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 26, 2008 at a distance of approximately 915,000 kilometers (569,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 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.