Rings and Janus

Janus, passing between the rings and Cassini, poses for a snapshot taken by the spacecraft's narrow-angle camera.

In this image, Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is closer to Cassini than are the rings. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. Janus has been brightened by a factor of 1.5 relative to the rings.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 28, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Janus. Image scale is 14 kilometers (9 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