Janus from Afar

Cassini's narrow angle camera captures Saturn's tiny irregular moon Janus surrounded by the vast, dark expanse of the outer solar system.

Janus (111 miles, or 179 kilometers across) shares an orbit with the moon Epimetheus; the two moons change orbital positions roughly every four years.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Janus. North on Janus is up and rotated 38 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 10, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 621,000 miles (1 million kilometers) from Janus. Raw image scale is 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) per pixel. This image has been zoomed in by a factor of two to enhance the visibility of Janus.

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-Caltech/Space Science Institute