The Roman god Janus is usually depicted with two faces, one looking
forward and one behind. Janus is captured here by Cassini, showing two
faces of its own.
This view shows a sliver of Janus's dayside, plus much of the dark side.
Part of the darkened terrain to the left is lit dimly by reflected light
from Saturn, revealing craters there.
North on Janus is up in this image. A brightly sunlit view of Janus (181
kilometers, or 113 miles across) can be seen in PIA07529.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Aug. 2, 2005, at a distance of approximately
541,000 kilometers (336,000 miles) from Janus and at a
Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 147 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel. The image has been
contrast-enhanced and magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.
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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.