Mimas Three-Quarter Portrait

Appearing like a cyclops gazing off into space, Saturn's moon Mimas and its large Herschel Crater are profiled in this view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Herschel Crater is 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, wide and covers most of the left of this image. Scientists continue to study this impact basin and its surrounding terrain (see PIA12569 and Streaked Craters in False-Color). This view looks toward the hemisphere of Mimas that leads in its orbit around Saturn. Mimas is 396 kilometers (246 miles) across. North on Mimas is up and rotated 13 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible green light with Cassini's wide-angle camera on Feb. 13, 2010 during its closest-ever flyby of the moon. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 15,000 kilometers (9,000 miles) from Mimas and at a sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 49 degrees. Image scale is 895 meters (2,937 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 in Washington. 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://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI