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Janus: God of Beginnings

March 25, 2005
This close-up view of Saturn's moon Janus from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows what appear to be two large craters near the boundary between day and night.

This close-up view of Saturn's moon Janus shows what appear to be two large craters near the boundary between day and night. The left side of the moon is lit feebly by reflected light from Saturn. 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 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 108 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel. The image has been contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of three to aid visibility.

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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