The Mimas Atlas (2008)

Presented here is a cartographic map sheet which forms a high-resolution Mimas atlas, a project of the Cassini Imaging Team.

Mimas, as imaged by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s, has a very large, distinguishing crater that makes it look like the “Death Star.” As shown in this map, that crater is named Herschel.

The map sheets form a three-quadrangle series covering the entire surface of Mimas at a nominal scale of 1:1,500,000. The map data was acquired by the Cassini imaging experiment. The mean radius of Mimas used for projection of the maps is 198.2 kilometers (123.2 miles). Names for features have been approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

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