Full of Holes

The sun's low angle near the terminator throws the craters of Mimas into stark relief.

This view looks toward high northern latitudes on Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) from a position 72 degrees north of the moon's equator. The north pole is in darkness at center.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 4, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 153,000 kilometers (95,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 106 degrees. Image scale on average is 918 meters (3,011 feet) 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