Mimas in Profile

The Cassini spacecraft spies the icy moon Mimas on the far side of Saturn's rings. The large crater Herschel gives the moon a flattened profile on its leading hemisphere, at left.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across). North is up and rotated 30 degrees to the left.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 2 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 22, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (831,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 16 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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