The Cassini spacecraft provides a window on the awesome scale of the
Saturn system, with the giant planet dominating one of its smaller
satellites.
Orbiting here, just outside the main ring system, is Janus (181
kilometers, or 113 miles across).
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 16
degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 13, 2008. The view was
obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million kilometers (1 million
miles) from Janus and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Janus.
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.