Mountain of Ice

The Cassini spacecraft captures a far-off view of Saturn's irregularly shaped, icy moon Janus.

North on Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across at its widest point) is toward the top of the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 10, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 886,000 kilometers (551,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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