Janus skirts the edges of Saturn's main rings. The Cassini spacecraft has
shown that this small moon and its co-orbital companion, Epimetheus, also
share their orbit with a diffuse ring of fine particles.
See PIA08322 for more information about the Janus-Epimetheus ring.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 11
degrees above the ringplane. Above Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles
across), at upper left, are the narrow F ring and the outer part of the A
ring.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (940,000 miles) from Janus and at
a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale is 9
kilometers (6 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 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.
