Links
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- Mimas on Wikipedia
Mimas
Details
Mimas is a small icy moon of Saturn dominated by the enormous Herschel crater. NASA notes that the impact that made Herschel may have come close to shattering the moon, leaving one of the most disproportionate giant craters in the Solar System.
Mimas is a small icy moon, but it does not look modest. Its appearance is dominated by the enormous Herschel crater, a scar so disproportionate that it seems to define the whole world at a glance. That makes Mimas one of the clearest examples in the Solar System of how a single impact can reshape not just a landscape, but the identity of an object.
What makes Herschel so striking is that the impact that formed it may have come close to shattering the moon altogether. Mimas is not a large, geologically buffered world with room to absorb collisions gracefully. It is a comparatively small icy body, and the crater records just how violent Solar System history could be for such fragile objects. The result is a moon that feels almost like a survivor.
That is why Mimas matters on this scale. It shows that small worlds are not necessarily simple worlds. A compact icy moon can preserve the signature of a near-catastrophic event in a way that remains visually obvious billions of years later. Mimas is memorable not because it is large, but because one collision left such an outsized mark on its history.
147km
Key facts
- Scale fact
- 396 kmdiameter
- Estimated age
- ~4.5 billion years
- Composition
- Mostly water ice
- Temperature
- ~75 K surface
Scale context
Where Mimas sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, Mimas sits between Cygnus X-1 and Ceres. The band below uses nearby Moons objects for context.
Together, these objects make the size change around Mimas easy to compare at a glance.
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.