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Pebble in a Pond

April 2, 2008
On Feb. 13, 2008, NASA's Cassini spacecraft provided a window on the awesome scale of the Saturn system, with the giant planet dominating one of its smaller satellites. Just outside the main ring system, orbits Janus.

The Cassini spacecraft provides a window on the awesome scale of the Saturn system, with the giant planet dominating one of its smaller satellites.

Orbiting here, just outside the main ring system, is Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across).

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 16 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 13, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Janus and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Janus.

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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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