PIA14596: Cut-Off Rings
 Target Name:  Mimas
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle
 Product Size:  1020 x 640 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA14596.tif (653.7 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA14596.jpg (14.18 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Saturn's moon Mimas joins the planet's rings which appear truncated by the planet's shadow in this Cassini spacecraft image.

Saturn is off to the left, out of view here. The inner rings are just visible there. But the planet's shadow covers part of the rings across the middle of the image. Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across) is closer to Cassini than the rings are here.

The bright speck above the rings is a star.

To increase visibility, the rings have been brightened by a factor of two relative to Mimas. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from just below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 21, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.7 million miles (2.7 million kilometers) from Mimas. Image scale is 10 miles (16 kilometers) per pixel on Mimas.

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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2012-02-20