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Herschel on the Edge

Feb. 18, 2008
On Dec. 2, 1007, NASA's Cassini spacecraft spied two of Saturn's small moons, Atlas and Epimetheus, that skirt the edges of the planet's rings.

Beyond the expanse of the rings sits Saturn's innermost large moon, Mimas. The rim of the large crater Herschel is visible as a flattening of the moon's leading side, at left.

The view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 6 degrees above the ringplane. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 18, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (989,000 miles) from Mimas. Image scale is 10 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 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.

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