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By Bright Rings

June 16, 2010
A pair of Saturn's small moons orbit near the planet's rings, which appear well illuminated in this view captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Janus is near the center of the image and Pandora is on the left.

A pair of Saturn's small moons orbit near the planet's rings, which appear well illuminated in this Cassini spacecraft view.

Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is near the center of the image and is farther than the rings from Cassini. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) is on the left. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 17, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Janus and Pandora. Image scale is 16 kilometers (10 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.

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