CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Mimas' Flat Spot

The limb of Saturn's moon Mimas appears flattened as Herschel Crater is viewed edge-on just to the right of the center of this Cassini image. The planet's rings are in the background.

Herschel Crater is 130 kilometers (80 miles) wide and located on the moon's leading hemisphere. See PIA12568 for a straight-on view of the crater.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across). North on Mimas is up and rotated 16 degrees to the left. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from just below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 31, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 260,000 kilometers (161,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 9 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (5,102 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: April 11, 2011 (PIA 12761)
Image/Caption Information 		  Mimas' Flat Spot
PIA 12761
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