Well, I had a huge post for today, and accidentally deleted it before posting it. I will develop all large future posts in a safer way. So for today, I will post an image or two of Mimas, a moon of Saturn. At 400 km across, it is only slightly smaller than Enceladus, but it shows no sign of activity. A large crater visible in some of the images gave it an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star!


At 6:49 PM EDT August 1, the Cassini spacecraft will make its closest approach to Mimas, coming within 62,000 km of the moon (it was originally going to be 49,000km, but this was sacrificed to allow Cassini to fly closer to Tethys on a future orbit, a moon that may be contributing particles to Saturn's rings). This is not a superclose flyby by Cassini standards, but it should be spectacular none-the-less. In the mean time, here is a super-resolution version of the closest Voyager view, taken by Voyager 1 in 1980 from 127,000 km (these distances can't be directly compared, because Cassini's cameras are far superior to Voyager's). It is made from the best three images from a six image set taken by Voyager.