So Close…

Saturn's moons Janus and Prometheus look close enough to touch in this stunningly detailed view.

From just beneath the ringplane, Cassini stares at Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) on the near side of the rings and Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) on the far side. The image shows that Prometheus is more elongated than Janus.

The view takes in the Cassini Division (4,800 kilometers, or 2,980 miles wide), from its outer edge to about halfway across its width.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 29, 2006 at a distance of approximately 218,000 kilometers (135,000 miles) from Janus and 379,000 kilometers (236,000 miles) from Prometheus. Image scale is about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) per pixel on Janus and 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel on Prometheus.

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 operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.