Soon after orbital insertion, Cassini returned its best look yet at the heavily cratered moon Mimas (398 kilometers, 247 miles across)
The Cassini spacecraft is putting together an impressive if preliminary image scrapbook of Saturn's moons, including this new view of Mimas.
Mimas (pronounced MY-mass) is small, just 247 miles (398 kilometers) wide. It sports a crater, named Herschel, that at 80 miles (130 kilometers) wide and 6 miles (10 kilometers) deep is remarkably large in comparison to the moon.
The photo, released this week, was taken July 3 just after Cassini entered orbit around Saturn. The craft was about a million miles (1.7 million kilometers) from Mimas. Cassini will get closer photos of Mimas later in the 4-year mission, and it will conduct close flybys of several other Saturnian satellites, too.
Mimas is one of the innermost of Saturn's 31 known moons. It's made largely of ice, astronomers think.
-- SPACE.com Staff
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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