CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Mimas in Hiding

Four minutes after Cassini captured dark Mimas and softly-lit Enceladus (see PIA08220) near the ringplane, Mimas had slipped into near-obscurity against Saturn's dark side.

Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across) is still visible as a dark spot just right of the planet's limb, leaving Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across) to bask in the ghostly light of Saturn.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 11, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Mimas, 4.3 kilometers (2.7 miles) from Enceladus and 4.1 million kilometers (2.6 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 25 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel on Saturn.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. 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-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: July 17, 2006 (PIA 08222)
Image/Caption Information 		  Mimas in Hiding
PIA 08222
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