Janus peeks out from beneath the ringplane, partially lit here by
reflected light from Saturn. A couple of craters can be seen on the moon's
surface. To the right, two faint clumps of material can be seen in the
dynamic F ring.
The perspective in this view may be a bit confusing -- from just below
the ringplane, Cassini is gazing toward Janus (181 kilometers, or 113
miles across), which is behind the rings.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 16, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.1
million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Janus and at a
Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 103 degrees. Image scale is 12
kilometers (8 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.
