Blasted by Impacts

Deep craters riddle the pulverized, icy surface of Saturn's moon Mimas.

This view looks toward southern latitudes on Mimas from a vantage point 47 degrees below the moon's equator. North is towards the top of the image and rotated 40 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 16, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 217,000 kilometers (135,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 83 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute