Cassini was nearly in the plane of Saturn's rings when it took this image
of Janus. The nearly edge-on rings appear almost ribbon-like in this view,
and some surface detail is visible on the small moon. Janus is 181
kilometers (113 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately
911,000 kilometers (566,000 miles) from Janus and at a
Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. The image scale is
5 kilometers (3 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 team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
