Mimas Adrift

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, Posted on: Tuesday, 14 October 2008, 07:21 CDT Download full size image

The Cassini spacecraft looks beyond Saturn's limb toward the icy face of Mimas, the innermost of the planet's major moons.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees below the ringplane. Mimas is 396 kilometers (246 miles) across.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 4, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn and 2.8 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Mimas. Image scale is 16 kilometers (10 miles) per pixel on Saturn and 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Mimas.

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.

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