Janus and Epimetheus continue to separate, following their orbital swap in
January 2006. Until 2010, Janus will remain the innermost of the pair,
whose orbits around Saturn are separated by only about 50 kilometers (31
miles) on average.
Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across) appears just right of the
bright A ring ansa, or edge, while Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles
across) is seen near upper right. (See PIA08170 for a closer view of
these dancing moons.)
The faint F ring extends across the image; Janus appears directly between
its near and far edges.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 16, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.7
million kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 22
kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Janus and Epimetheus.
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.
