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Highlighting Herschel

July 21, 2009
The Herschel crater dominates this view of Saturn's moon Mimas as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The Herschel crater dominates this view of Saturn's moon Mimas.

The 130-kilometer, or 80-mile, wide crater is located in the middle latitudes of Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across).

The most brightly lit terrain seen here, lit by the sun, is on the leading hemisphere of the moon. Light reflected from Saturn dimly lights the other side of the moon. This view is centered on terrain at 37 degrees north latitude, 300 degrees west longitude. The north pole of Mimas lies on the terminator about a quarter of the way inward from the top of the image.

Scale in the original image was 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 119 degrees.

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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