Janus coasts past as the Cassini spacecraft takes in a view of the
unilluminated side of the rings. Bright regions within the rings appear so
because they allow scattered sunlight to filter through.
This view looks toward the rings from about 3 degrees above the ringplane.
The dark, relatively dense B ring lies at center, flanked by the much
brighter C and A rings. The thin line of the F ring encompasses the rest.
Janus at bottom right is 181 kilometers (113 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Oct. 1, 2007. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 581,000 kilometers (361,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees at the center of this
view. Image scale is 28 kilometers (17 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.
