Janus Before the Rings

Saturn's moon Janus, its rugged surface shown in shadow and light, passes before the planet's rings.

See PIA11575 to see a closer view of this moon. Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is closer to Cassini than the rings are. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 1 degree above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 17, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (994,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 91 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 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/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.