Two of Saturn's moons coast along the outer edge of the main ring system.
The orbits of seven small moons cluster just outside the F ring—between the
orbits of Pan and the co-orbital moons Janus and Epimetheus.
Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across at its widest point) appears as a
bright dot within the Encke Gap, right of center. Janus (179 kilometers,
111 miles across at its widest point) lies outside the A and F rings,
below center.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 2 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 22, 2008. The view was obtained at
a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from
Janus. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
