Twice the Terminators

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Caption:

The transition from light to dark takes place on two fronts in this image of Mimas. The two terminators that stretch across the moon are created by sunshine across the north and Saturn-shine in the east.

This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across). North on Mimas is up and rotated 33 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 23, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 508,000 kilometers (316,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 152 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 .

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