Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

Misleading Perspective

Caption: Mimas (397 kilometers, 247 miles across) is much smaller than Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across), but the geometry of this scene exaggerates the actual differences in size. Here, Mimas is on the opposite side of the rings from Rhea and Cassini.

Saturn’s shadow slices across the ringplane here. The view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere on Mimas, and the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Rhea.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on September 9, 2005, from a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Rhea. Mimas was located on the far side of the rings, about 670,000 kilometers (420,000 miles) farther from Cassini. The image scale is 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 13 kilometers (8 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Usage Restrictions: Image is in the public domain. Appropriate credit is requested.