Mimas’ Stretched Shadow

The shadow of Saturn's moon Mimas is elongated across the planet in this Cassini spacecraft image.

The moon itself is not shown, but the shadow appears just above the ringplane on the right of the image. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 1 degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 18, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 92 degrees. Image scale is 112 kilometers (70 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