PIA12669: Staring Into Space


Staring Into Space

Caption:

Herschel Crater features prominently on the moon Mimas in this Cassini spacecraft image, which gives the impression of an eye staring out into space.

Herschel Crater is about 130 kilometers, or 81 miles, wide and covers a significant part of the moon. This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across). North on Mimas is up and rotated 1 degree to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 3, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 476,000 kilometers (296,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 56 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

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
System Saturn
Target Type Satellite
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Narrow Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Crater, Grayscale, Rotation, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2010-07-05
Date in Caption 2010-03-03
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12669
Identifier PIA12669