Space Image: Moon Mimas as a Dot Against the Dark
Posted Today
As if trying to get our attention,
Mimas is positioned against the shadow of Saturn’s rings, bright on
dark. As we near summer in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, the rings cast
ever larger shadows on the planet.
With a reflectivity of about 96 percent,
Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across) appears bright against the
less-reflective Saturn.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the
rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken
with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 13, 2014 using a
spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared
light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Saturn and
approximately 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Mimas.
Image scale is 67 miles (108 kilometers) per pixel at Saturn and 60
miles (97 kilometers) per pixel at Mimas.
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.
Source: NASA
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