First Quarter Mimas

As the closest-orbiting of Saturn's intermediate-sized moons, Mimas is occasionally captured against the planet's dim and shadowed northern latitudes. The moon is seen here next to the shadows cast by the dense B ring. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 90 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute