Craters on Janus

From hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, the Cassini spacecraft spies craters on the surface of the moon Janus.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across). North on Janus is up and rotated 27 degrees to the right. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 25, 2009.

Scale in the original image was 4 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 730,000 kilometers (454,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 38 degrees.

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