Saturn’s Death Star Moon Mimas – Gaping Craters & Terrible Temperatures Highlight This Frozen Moon

New photos of Saturn's icy moon Mimas has been sent by the Cassini spacecraft revealing the startling resemblance of the moon with Darth Vader's Death Star in 'Star Wars.' The fresh new pictures were sent in October and were highlighted by NASA Monday.

Mimas is actually twice as big as the famous Death Star at 246 miles in diameter, CNET said. A report highlighted the exceptionally gaping large crater called the Herschel Crater which was discovered in the 18^th century by an astronomer who discovered the moon. This crater looked very similar to the large concave dish which is found in the Death Star. And while the concave dish of the Death Star contained a laser canon, the Herschel Crater has a mountain as tall as Mount Everest in its center.

The stunning photo of the Death Star moon was taken from a distance of 115,000 miles. The distance allowed some light to highlight the shadows formed by Mimas' numerous craters to fall on its surfacer. It's sad though that this would be one of the final images that the Cassini spacecraft would send back to Earth. It would soon end its mission and would simply be thrown into Saturn's atmosphere later this year.

Meanwhile, Space describes Mimas as a Pac-Man shaped moon saying that the gaping crater actually covers a large area of its surface. The report also mentioned that Mimas has a relatively strange interior that cannot be explained by photos sent by Cassini. A study in 2014 determined that Mimas actually wobbles as it moves around Saturn and this causes interactions with the planet.

This wobbling also makes the moon irregular in shape and could be the reason for having an oval core. There could be no oceans in the surface of Mimas because of its icy surface as compared to Enceladus; one of Saturn's other moons that have oceans and even geysers.

The Herschel Crater is the most noticeable feature of Mimas and it spreads 88 miles across which is a third of the moon's diameter. Another coincidental fact between Mimas and Star Wars was the features of Mimas were not complete discovered until 1980, three years after 'Star Wars' appeared in theaters. Mimas was too small to study; only the Voyager space probe was able to highlight its features that year.