Sunday, November 27, 2005

Photograph Of Mimas, A Moon Of Saturn

Image by: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute - Click photograph to enlarge

A moon of Saturn, the Meteor-hammered Mimas, has been photographed by the Cassini spacecraft, now in the vicinity of Saturn. The heavily pockmarked moon is seen in front of Saturn's rings (the scale of the photo is roughly three miles per pixel).

Mimas is mainly ice. The 80 mile wide crater you see is called Herschel and covers nearly one-third the moon's diameter (yeah, it doesn't look like one-third to me either. But what am I going to do?, have someone else measure it?).

Herschel is six miles deep, with a central mountain rising three and a half miles above the crater floor (presumably the nipple-like protrusion, dead center, in the crater). Fracture marks from the impact can be seen on the opposite side of Mimas.

This image, from the Cassini narrow-angle camera, was taken on Oct. 13, 2005, about 442,000 miles from Mimas.

The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Cassini imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
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