Saturn and Mimas

A kingly crescent Saturn rests on the right of this Cassini spacecraft portrait while the moon Mimas appears above the rings on the left.

Mimas looks like just a speck of light here but is actually 396 kilometers, or 246 miles, across. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. Mimas was brightened by a factor of 1.4 relative to Saturn and the rings.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on November 28, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 103 degrees. Image scale is 144 kilometers (89 miles) per pixel.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute