On its first orbit of the ringed planet, the Cassini spacecraft gazed into the distance to capture this image of the icy moon Mimas (398 kilometers or 247 miles wide). The faint F ring is visible as the outermost strand of the rings in this view.
The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on August 16, 2004, at a distance of 8.9 million kilometers (5.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 53 kilometers (33 miles) per pixel. Contrast was slightly enhanced to aid visibility.
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 Cassini-Huygens 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 and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
