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Janus Rides the Rings

March 24, 2005
NASA's Cassini spacecraft was nearly in the plane of Saturn's rings when it took this image of Janus.

Cassini was nearly in the plane of Saturn's rings when it took this image of Janus. The nearly edge-on rings appear almost ribbon-like in this view, and some surface detail is visible on the small moon. Janus is 181 kilometers (113 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 911,000 kilometers (566,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. The image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

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