Incredible sharp and clear image taken of Saturns Moon Mimas by NASA - Feb 1, 2017

That is certainly a well-battered little sponge cake. Even if I had no idea of it's orbit, I would guess it to be near the main body of the debris cloud/ring system.
Thank you. That's a great image.

Looks like CGI to me.... Just saying

a reply to: hutch622

First thing i thought of was golf ball before they became cut proof

Same here - those craters look mighty deep if its diameter is 396 kms

a reply to: carewemust

If true, shouldn't the "clump" that coalesced into the Saturn and it's moons, be made of the same material..thereby causing all the moons to look nearly the same?

shhh...don't speak too loud, nothing to see here.

saturndeathcult.com...

I rewatched Interstellar again the other night. Funny how they said in the movie that a wormhole appeared near Saturn to enable wormhole travel to save the Earth

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
a reply to: hutch622

First thing i thought of was golf ball before they became cut proof

Same here - those craters look mighty deep if its diameter is 396 kms

That would be because Mimas is mostly ice rather than rock. Impacts in ice are deeper and sharper than in rock.

a reply to: carewemust

carewemust,

By the logic you are using to query the construction of Saturn's moons, their variety and disposition, one would assume that all the worlds orbiting our Sun ought to be made of largely the same things, and look relatively similar. This is, of course, flawed thinking.

Saturn and Jupiter have large gravity wells, larger than any body in the solar system other than the Sun itself. This means that their moons behaviour relative to them, is more similar to that of planets around a star, than it is to that of a mere moon around a planet.

Those moons formed out of what was left over from the formation of the planet itself, and in similar ways to the way that planets formed around the sun. The gravity well of the planet captured the chemicals of which those moons are made, and because those chemicals have different mass and weight and so on, they coalesced at different distances from the parent planet. Jupiter and Saturn are like microcosms of a solar system, having as they do complex systems of orbiting moons in their own right. When spacecraft pass through or close by Jupiter's gravity well, those craft are considered not to simply be visiting Jupiter, but to be visiting the Jovian system, for precisely this reason. You could say the same of Saturn without being in error.

a reply to: wildespace

thanks

Another version of the true-colour image I posted earlier:



You can tell that it's ice surface, not rock.

a reply to: wildespace

Indeed.

That glare from the crater edges in the top left quadrant of the image is clearly a reflection from ice, as opposed to some sort of metallic substance.

Turns out, those are Cassini's last closeup images of Mimas! All future observations of Mimas will be from more than twice this distance... So it's time to say Goodbye, Mimas, and thanks for all the Star Wars jokes.


Here's one of those latest shots, enhanced to better show the night side, lit by santurnshine: photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov...

I did a little image enhancement to see what details I could bring out: