Saturn's moon Mimas hangs in the sky above Saturn's rings in this Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera image from Aug. 3, 2004. Saturn's shadow stretches across the rings at bottom right, while several bright clumps in the F ring orbit the planet. Mimas is 398 kilometers (247 miles) wide.
The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera at a distance of 8 million kilometers (5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 48 kilometers (30 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
