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Facing Janus

Jan. 4, 2008
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks down toward Janus, which hugs the outer edges of Saturn's rings. Janus orbits Saturn beyond the narrow core of the F ring in this image captured on Nov. 25, 2007.

Cassini looks down toward Janus, which hugs the outer edges of Saturn's rings. Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) orbits Saturn about 11,250 kilometers (6,990 miles) beyond the narrow core of the F ring.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 6 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 26, 2007. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 31 degrees. Image scale is 13 kilometers (8 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 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.

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