Cassini Equinox Mission: Images
Rated • 1 review • astronomy, space exploration, space, planets, saturn • nasa.gov
The Cassini spacecraft looks upward from beneath the ringplane to spy the moon Mimas floating above the shadowed cloudtops of the Saturnian north.This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 5 degrees below the ringplane. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across. The rings themselves produce the shadows which, from this perspective, appear to overlay.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 18, 2007, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3.4 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn.
