This close-up look at Saturn's moon Janus reveals spots on the moon's
surface which may be dark material exposed by impacts. If the dark
markings within bright terrain are indeed impact features, then Janus'
surface represents a contrast with that of Saturn's moon Phoebe, where
impacts have uncovered bright material beneath a darker overlying layer.
Janus is 181 kilometers (113 miles) across.
Janus may be a porous body, composed mostly of water ice.
This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately
357,000 kilometers (222,000 miles) from Janus and at a
Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 6 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel. The view was
magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility of
the moon's surface.
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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
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.
