Saturn's moons Janus and Prometheus look close enough to touch in this
stunningly detailed view.
From just beneath the ringplane, Cassini stares at Janus (181 kilometers,
or 113 miles across) on the near side of the rings and Prometheus (102
kilometers, or 63 miles across) on the far side. The image shows that
Prometheus is more elongated than Janus.
The view takes in the Cassini Division (4,800 kilometers, or 2,980 miles
wide), from its outer edge to about halfway across its width.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 29, 2006 at a distance of approximately
218,000 kilometers (135,000 miles) from Janus and 379,000 kilometers
(236,000 miles) from Prometheus. Image scale is about 1 kilometer (0.6
mile) per pixel on Janus and 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel on
Prometheus.
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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging
team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
