Mimas Seeking Solitude

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Caption:

Cassini looked toward the night side of Saturn to spy the darkened orb of Mimas barely visible here near the center of the image hugging the planet's shadow. To the left of Mimas are several bright features in the faint D ring.

The innermost of Saturn's medium-sized icy moons, Mimas, is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 7, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Mimas and 4 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Saturn. The Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle is 161 degrees. Image scale is 24 kilometers (15 miles) per pixel on Saturn.

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

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