Janus on the Far Side

Janus peeks out from beneath the ringplane, partially lit here by reflected light from Saturn. A couple of craters can be seen on the moon's surface. To the right, two faint clumps of material can be seen in the dynamic F ring.

The perspective in this view may be a bit confusing -- from just below the ringplane, Cassini is gazing toward Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across), which is behind the rings.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 16, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 103 degrees. Image scale is 12 kilometers (8 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