Helene and Mimas

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Caption:

Two moons of Saturn rendezvous in the Saturnian skies above the Cassini spacecraft.

Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is seen here just before gliding in front of Helene (32 kilometers, or 20 miles across), which lays 192,000 kilometers (119,000 miles) in the distance beyond the larger moon.

The limb of Mimas is flattened in the west, where the rim if the large crater Herschel lies.

This view looks toward the lit side of the rings from about 3 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 3, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Mimas and 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Helene. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on Mimas and 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Helene.

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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