PIA06654: Mimas Stares Back
 Target Name:  Mimas
 Is a satellite of:  Saturn
 Mission:  Cassini-Huygens
 Spacecraft:  Cassini Orbiter
 Instrument:  ISS - Narrow Angle
 Product Size:  661 x 655 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Cassini Imaging Team
 Primary Data Set:  Cassini
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA06654.tif (433.6 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA06654.jpg (9.861 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:

The great eye of Saturn's moon Mimas, a 130-kilometer-wide (80-mile) impact crater called Herschel, stares out from the battered moon. Several individual ringlets within the F ring are resolved here, and the small moon Atlas is also seen faintly outside the main rings.

Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles across); the view shows principally the moon's anti-Saturn hemisphere. Atlas is 32 kilometers (20 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 5, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:
2005-05-23