A Mimas Of A View Out Saturn Way

The Cassini spacecraft peers through the fine, smoke-sized ice particles of Saturn's F ring toward the cratered face of Mimas.

By Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team · Editorial process

Published January 2, 2008

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.

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Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team

The Nuclear Power Daily Editorial Team produces content across our two editorial pillars: space industry news and Mind & Meaning. We cover launches, missions, satellites, defense, and the technology of getting humans to space, alongside the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Nuclear Power Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.