Categories: Saturn

Death Star Mimas and Its Giant Crater Herschel

Mimas standing in front of Saturn’s rings. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI Click to enlarge
Impact-battered Mimas steps in front of Saturn’s rings, showing off its giant 130-kilometer (80-mile) wide crater Herschel.

The illuminated terrain seen here is on the moon’s leading hemisphere. North on Mimas is up and rotated 20 degrees to the left. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2005 at a distance of approximately 711,000 kilometers (442,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 112 degrees. The image scale is 4 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.

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 .

Original source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release

Fraser Cain

Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today. He's also the co-host of Astronomy Cast with Dr. Pamela Gay.

Recent Posts

There’s Enough Oxygen in the Lunar Regolith to Support Billions of People on the Moon

In recent article, soil scientist John Grant discusses the ways in which we could harvest…

11 hours ago

There’s So Much Pressure at the Earth’s Core, it Makes Iron Behave in a Strange Way

It's one of nature's topsy-turvy tricks that the deep interior of the Earth is as…

15 hours ago

An Absolutely Bonkers Plan to Give Mars an Artificial Magnetosphere

To terraform Mars, we will need to give it a protective magnetic field. Here's how…

17 hours ago

SpinLaunch Hurls a Test Vehicle Kilometers Into the air. Eventually, it’ll Throw Them Almost all the way to Orbit

The commercial space company SpinLaunch just conducted its first successful launch test from their facility…

1 day ago

Eggshell Planets Have a Thin Brittle Crust and No Mountains or Tectonics

Planets without plate tectonics are unlikely to be habitable. But currently, we've never seen the…

2 days ago

LightSail 2 has Been Flying for 30 Months now, Paving the way for Future Solar Sail Missions

Even after 30 months in space, The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 mission continues to successfully…

2 days ago