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

First Quarter Mimas

Caption: As the closest-orbiting of Saturn’s intermediate-sized moons, Mimas (397 kilometers, 247 miles across) is occasionally captured against the planet’s dim and shadowed northern latitudes. The moon is seen here next to the shadows cast by the dense B ring.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera on July 18, 2005, from a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 90 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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 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.