Rugged Janus

Craters large and small cover the rugged surface of Saturn's moon Janus.

This view looks toward the southern hemisphere of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across at its widest point). The moon's south pole is at center.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 26, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 186,000 kilometers (115,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 83 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) 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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.