Two Lights on Two-faced Janus

The small moon Janus is illuminated by light from both the sun and Saturn.

This view looks toward the south pole of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) which lies on the terminator just below the center of the image. Brightly lit terrain seen on the right is on the leading hemisphere of Janus. Light reflected off Saturn dimly lights the Saturn-facing side of Janus on the top left of the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 9, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 974,000 kilometers (605,000 miles) from Janus and at a sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 99 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute