Trailing Hemisphere Craters

The Cassini spacecraft looks down on the north pole of Mimas and sees the moon's cratered trailing hemisphere.

The moon's north pole lies on the terminator about a quarter of the way inward from the top of the moon on the right side of this image. The view is centered on terrain at 42 degrees north latitude, 236 degrees west longitude. Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 27, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 541,000 kilometers (336,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 49 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