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Janus in the Way

March 28, 2011
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks past the cratered south polar area of Saturn's moon Rhea to spy the moon Dione and the planet's rings in the distance. Dione's 'wispy' terrain can be seen on the trailing hemisphere of that moon.

Saturn's moon Janus obscures part of the planet's A ring as the Cassini spacecraft looks toward the main rings and the thin F ring.

Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) appears as a dark oval to the left of the center of the image. A star can also be seen on the right of the image, beyond the thin F ring.

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 Jan. 21, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Janus. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 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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