Featured planetary moon
Mimas
A small icy moon defined by one enormous scar.
Mimas is dominated visually by the Herschel impact basin, a crater so large relative to the moon that it reshapes the entire silhouette. Its compact orbit places it deep inside Saturn’s intricate ring-and-moon system.
- Orbit representation
- Representative mean elements
- Surface
- derived map
Reference measurements
The numbers that shape this world
- Mean radius
- 198.2 km
- Mean orbital distance
- 186,000 kmSemi-major axis around the parent body.
- Orbital period
- 22.62 hours
- Eccentricity
- 0.02
- Inclination
- 1.6°Local Laplace plane from the JPL pole
- Rotation
- Tidally locked
World portrait
Scale revealed by a single crater
The impact basin is not decorative shorthand; it is the clearest way to understand how small Mimas is and how close the collision came to disrupting it.
System geometry
Mimas in motion around Saturn
Mimas travels at a mean orbital distance of 186,000 km and completes a circuit in 22.62 hours. Its eccentricity of 0.02 and 1.6° inclination are read against Local Laplace plane from the JPL pole. Synchronous rotation keeps the same hemisphere broadly oriented toward the parent body.
Representation notes
What Explore is showing
JPL fitted mean elements describe general orbit shape and orientation; they are not an accurate ephemeris.
Reviewed official global map prepared as a 1K display texture. Small no-data seams were cleaned without inventing large-scale landmarks; final seam, pole and lighting review remains device-dependent.
Provenance