This close pairing of Janus and Epimetheus shows the two moons at "high
phase," meaning that only a thin sliver of sunlit terrain is visible on
each moon. Portions of each are also lit feebly by reflected light from
Saturn.
Here, Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) is at top and Epimetheus
(116 kilometers, or 72 miles across) is below.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Dec. 25, 2005, at a distance of approximately
479,000 kilometers (298,000 miles) from Janus and 455,000 kilometers
(283,000 miles) from Epimetheus. The image scale is about 3 kilometers
(2 miles) per pixel on both moons.
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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
