CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Mimas Emerges

Cassini watches a thin, bright sliver emerge from the hazy limb of Saturn.

In one minute, the sliver ballooned into the full disk of Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across), which coasted silently into the black sky.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from less than a degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 26, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is about 9 kilometers (6 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 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: December 20, 2007 (PIA 09797)
Image/Caption Information 		  Mimas Emerges
PIA 09797
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