Space Image: Mimas Stares Back

Posted Yesterday

The great eye of Saturn’s moon Mimas, a 130-kilometer-wide (80-mile) impact crater called Herschel, stares out from the battered moon. Several individual ringlets within the F ring are resolved here, and the small moon Atlas is also seen faintly outside the main rings.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles across); the view shows principally the moon’s anti-Saturn hemisphere. Atlas is 32 kilometers (20 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 5, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
Source: NASA