Ragged Crescent

Craters cover the rugged surface of Saturn's moon Janus.

The view is from 42 degrees above the moon's equator. North on Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is towards the top of the image.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 17, 2008 using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of polarized green light centered at 617 and 568 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 350,000 kilometers (217,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute