Blasted Janus

Saturn's moon Janus shows the scars of impacts in this Cassini spacecraft image of craters light and dark.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across). North on Janus is up and rotated 10 degrees to the right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 7, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 75,000 kilometers (47,000 miles) from Janus and at a sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 39 degrees. Image scale is 448 meters (1,469 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