Saturn's moon Mimas shines in reflected ultraviolet light from the Sun in this Cassini image. Ultraviolet images of Saturn's moons often reveal the walls of their myriad craters in greater contrast than do images taken in visible light. This view, which shows the large impact crater Herschel, is no exception. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The image was acquired on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 938,000 kilometers (583,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 99 degrees. The image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.