In Formation

Saturn's moons Janus and Mimas coast in their silent orbits beyond the rings in this view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The ansa, or outer edge of the rings, is visible at left. Janus hangs above center, while Mimas shines at right. Owing to its irregular shape, Janus’ terminator – that line which separates day from night – is jagged, while Mimas’ smooth terminator attests to its round shape shape and larger size.

The image was taken in green light with Cassini's narrow-angle camera on Oct. 27, 2015.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 598,000 miles (963,000 kilometers) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 86 degrees. Image scale at Janus is 3.6 miles (5.8 kilometers) per pixel. The distance to Mimas was 680,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) for an image scale of 4.1 miles (6.6 kilometer) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute