Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

 

The Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft recently relayed a spectacular image of Saturn and two of its small moons, Mimas and Helene, in a wonderful conjunction in the Saturnian skies.

 

Mimas (397 km across) is about to occult Helene (32 km across), which lies 192,000 km beyond Mimas. Mimas' western limb is flattened where its large crater Herschel exists.

 

The spacecraft looks on the lit side of the Saturnian rings from only 3° below the ringplane. 

 

The image was taken in visible light with Cassini's narrow-angle camera on 3 February 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million km from Mimas.

 

Image scale is 8 km per pixel on Mimas and 9 km per pixel on Helene.

 

Further reading

Mimas

http://www.nineplanets.org/mimas.html

Dione and Helene

http://www.nineplanets.org/dione.html

The Cassini-Huygens Mission

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

 

 

Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem