The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the Saturnian horizon as Dione and
Janus glide past.
A few craters are visible on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles
across). Janus (181 kilometers, or113 miles across) is slightly blurred
due to its motion during the exposure.
The rings appear essentially edge-on in this view, as the Cassini
spacecraft continues its recent activities close to the ringplane.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
March 10, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 750 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of
approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. The
image scale is 17 kilometers (11 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.