Mimas' Herschel Crater Gets New Image

The NASA/ESA Cassini spacecraft has recently snapped a new image of the Death Star-like Saturnine moon Mimas, with a focus on the massive Herschel Crater that adorns the space rock's surface. The feature is very peculiar because of its sheer size, which means that the object which impacted the moon must have been massive. Regardless, the natural satellite did not break apart, which is very peculiar for astronomers. Cassini flew at the point of closest approach on February 13, and now experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, are releasing the results.

In addition to the close-up images of the crater, which were the main objective of the flyby, the space probe also revealed important data about Mimas' thermal signature, as well as of its surface composition. The scientific instruments on Cassini are very efficient at collecting this sort of data, given that the spacecraft flies sufficiently close to its target for them to enter their optimum observations range. But the main focus of the flight was the 140-kilometer (88-mile) wide Herschel Crater, a relic of a time when the solar system was being heavily bombarded by comets and asteroids coming from its outer fringes.

“Some of the raw, unprocessed images sent back from the flyby show the bright, steep slopes of the giant Herschel Crater […]. The icy slopes appear to be pitched around 24 degrees, which would probably earn them a black- or double-black-diamond rating on Earth. Olympic downhill skiers could probably tear down these runs with ease, but it's clear Mimas is no place for bunny-slope beginners. The images, which have the highest resolution so far, also show jumbled terrain inside the crater and many craters within the crater. These features hint at a long history, which scientists will be working diligently to analyze,” JPL scientists write in a press release on their official website.

“This flyby has been like looking at a cell or an onion skin under the microscope for the first time. We'd seen the large crater from afar since the early 1980s, but now its small bumps and blemishes are all clearly visible,” adds Satellite Orbiter Science Team co-leader, Bonnie Buratti. Cassini flew an average of about 9,500 kilometers (5,900 miles) above the surface of Mimas, a distance sufficiently small to produce very interesting data. A wider selection of the pictures collected during the latest flyby are available here.