The small, dark form of Janus cruises along in front of bright Saturn. The
edge-on rings cast dramatic shadows onto the northern hemisphere.
Janus is 181 kilometers (113 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 21, 2006, 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 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.