The Cassini spacecraft provides this dramatic portrait of Janus against
the cloud-streaked backdrop of Saturn.
Like many small bodies in the solar system, Janus (181 kilometers, or 113
miles across) is potato-shaped with many craters, and the moon has a
surface that looks as though it has been smoothed by some process. Like
Pandora (see PIA07632) and Telesto (see PIA07696), Janus may be covered
with a mantle of fine dust-sized, icy material.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 930 nanometers. The view was acquired with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 25, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 145,000 kilometers (90,000 miles) from Janus and at a
Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 62 degrees. North on Saturn is
up. Image scale is 871 meters (2,858 feet) 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.
