CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
An Eye on Mimas

Cassini turns the eye of its camera toward Saturn's moon Mimas and spies the large Herschel Crater which itself looks like the iris of an eye peering out into space.

Herschel Crater is 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, wide and covers most of the right of this image. Scientists continue to study this impact basin and its surrounding terrain (see PIA12568).

Lit terrain seen here is on leading hemisphere of Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across). North on Mimas is up and rotated 1 degree to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 16, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 103,000 kilometers (64,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 113 degrees. Image scale is 613 meters (2,012 feet) 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/Space Science Institute
Released: November 8, 2010 (PIA 12739)
Image/Caption Information 		  An Eye on Mimas
PIA 12739
Avg Rating: 9.63/10

Full Size 990x990:
JPEG 51 KB
PNG 77 KB
TIFF 136 KB