PIA11540: Highlighting Herschel


Highlighting Herschel

Caption:

The Herschel crater dominates this view of Saturn's moon Mimas.

The 130-kilometer, or 80-mile, wide crater is located in the middle latitudes of Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across).

The most brightly lit terrain seen here, lit by the sun, is on the leading hemisphere of the moon. Light reflected from Saturn dimly lights the other side of the moon. This view is centered on terrain at 37 degrees north latitude, 300 degrees west longitude. The north pole of Mimas lies on the terminator about a quarter of the way inward from the top of the image.

Scale in the original image was 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 119 degrees.

Background Info:

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 .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Mimas Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite Planet
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2009-07-21
Date in Caption 2009-06-03
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11540
Identifier PIA11540