(See description below)
Mimas above Saturn
In a splendid portrait created by light and
gravity, lonely Mimas is seen against the
cool, blue-streaked backdrop of Saturn’s northern
hemisphere. Delicate shadows cast by the rings arc gracefully
across the planet, fading into darkness on Saturn’s night
side.
The part of the atmosphere seen here appears darker and more
bluish than the warm brown and gold hues seen in Cassini images
of the southern hemisphere, due to preferential scattering of
blue wavelengths by the cloud-free upper atmosphere.
The bright blue swath near Mimas (398 kilometers, 247 miles
across) is created by sunlight passing through the Cassini
division (4,800 kilometers, or 2,980 miles wide). (The rightmost
part of this distinctive feature is slightly overexposed and
therefore bright white in this image.) Shadows of several thin
ringlets within the division can be seen here as well. The dark
band that stretches across the center of the image is the shadow
of Saturn’s B ring, the densest of the main rings. Part of
the actual Cassini division appears at bottom, along with the A
ring and the narrow, outer F ring. The A ring is transparent
enough that, from this viewing angle, the atmosphere and
threadlike shadows cast by the inner C ring are visible through
it.
Images taken with red, green and blue filters were combined to
create this color view. The images were obtained with the narrow
angle camera on November 7, 2004, from a distance of 3.7 million
kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 22
kilometers (14 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging
team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the
Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.