Mimas peeks over Saturn's limb, dwarfed by the planet and its north polar hexagon. Saturn's A ring also makes an appearance on the far right. Mimas is 246 miles (396 kilometers) across
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 21 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 28, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 495,000 miles (797,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 4 degrees. Image scale is 27 miles (44 kilometers) per pixel.
The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Released: March 18, 2013 (PIA 14652)
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PIA 14652
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