Rugged Mimas

The oblate moon Mimas displays the cratered surface of its anti-Saturn side.

North on Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) is up and rotated 1 degree to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 22, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 588,000 kilometers (365,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale in the original image was 4 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel. The image was contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of 2 to enhance the visibility of surface features.

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