Categories: AstronomyAstrophotos

A beautiful picture of Saturn’s heavily-cratered moon Mimas, processed by @kevinmgill

The Cassini mission to Saturn took many images of Mimas, one of the smallest moons in the solar system. And now you can view it in all its icy, cratered glory, thanks to the work of Kevin Gill.

Mimas is perhaps best known as the “Death Star” moon, because a giant impact crater on one side kinda makes it look like that famous space station in the Star Wars movies.

But Mimas has so much more to offer. It’s one of the smallest moons in the entire solar system, just over a hundred miles wide. It’s so small that it can barely keep its round shape, and is somewhat fatter around the middle because of it.

Whatever caused that giant crater almost split the world in half, and fractures on the far side of the moon remain today.

You wanted Mimas, you got it. Imaged by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and processed by @kevinmgill

Besides that, its icy surface (Mimas is made of almost entirely pure water ice) is pitted by scores of craters, indicating a violent history. That violent is not surprising, as it sits incredibly close to Saturn, and its presence has carved the Cassini Division, a wide gap in that giant’s incredible rings.

This stunning image of Mimas comes to us courtesy of the Cassini mission, which took thousands of images of the little moon in a variety of wavelengths over the course of its 19-year-long mission. Recently, astrophotographer Kevin Gill took a stab at combining several filtered images to provide this impressive image.

Enjoy it, because it’s likely to be the last image of this resolution we’re going to get for a long time.

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysicist, Author, Host | pmsutter.com

Recent Posts

Starship’s Booster (and Donald Trump) Make a Splash With Sixth Flight Test

SpaceX's Starship launch system went through its sixth flight test today, and although the Super…

9 hours ago

The Strange Pulsar at the Center of the Crab Nebula

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we all have a vivid image of the Crab…

16 hours ago

The Biggest Black Holes May Start From The Tiniest Seeds

The existence of gigantic black holes in the very early universe challenges our assumptions of…

23 hours ago

China’s Proposed Cargo Shuttle, the Haolong, Has Entered Development

The 2024 China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition was held in Zhuhai last week -…

2 days ago

Up to a Third of Stars Ate Some of their Planets

In recent years, astronomers have developed techniques to measure the metal content of stars with…

2 days ago

The Large Magellanic Cloud Survived its Closest Approach to the Milky Way

The Large Magellanic Cloud is the closest, brightest dwarf galaxy to the Milky Way—20 times…

2 days ago