Profile of Janus

This shadowy scene is one of the Cassini spacecraft's closest views of Saturn's moon Janus.

The slopes of some craters here display hints of the darker material better seen on Epimetheus in Epimetheus Revealed. A bright linear feature runs up the wall of the large crater at bottom center.

The view looks toward southern latitudes on Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across). North is toward the top of the image and rotated 58 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 30, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 33,000 kilometers (21,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 120 degrees. Image scale is 200 meters (656 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute