Three moons have bunched themselves together in this image of Saturn's
rings.
Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) sits bright and overexposed
outside the faint F ring. Prometheus (86 kilometers, 53 miles across) lies
inside the F ring to the left of the center of the image. Tiny Daphnis (8
kilometers, or 5 miles across) is present but not visible in the thin
Keeler Gap of the A ring just below Prometheus in this image.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 20 degrees
below the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 2, 2009. The view was acquired at a
distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from
Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 47 degrees. Image
scale is 63 kilometers (39 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.