Saturn and Mimas

Overexposed Mimas stands starkly against the disk of Saturn as the dim shadow of Epimetheus is captured through the C ring in the planet's rings (right of center at the bottom of the image). In reality, Mimas orbits in the same plane as the rings; it is Cassini's viewing geometry that tricks our eyes.

The image was taken in blue light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 26, 2008 at a distance of approximately 915,000 kilometers (569,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is 55 kilometers (34 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