The Cassini spacecraft peers through the fine, smoke-sized ice particles
of Saturn's F ring toward the cratered face of Mimas. The F ring's core,
which contains significantly larger particles, is dense enough to
completely block the light from Mimas.
The view looks toward the trailing hemisphere on the Saturn-facing side of
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across), and toward the sunlit side of
the rings from about 2 degrees below the ringplane.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Nov. 18, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 772,000 kilometers (480,000 miles) from Mimas. Image
scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel on the moon.
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 operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
