Positive ID

The great basin that interrupts the contours of this moon's crescent identifies the satellite unmistakably as Mimas. The giant crater Herschel (130 kilometers, or 80 miles wide) is this moon's most obvious feature.

North on Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is up and rotated 23 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 8, 2006 at a distance of approximately 534,000 kilometers (331,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 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