Rings on a Diagonal

A pair of Saturn's small moons, Janus and Pandora, accompany the planet's rings in this Cassini spacecraft image presenting the view in dramatic diagonal fashion.

The rings are between the two moons. Janus, just above the center of the image, is most distant here. This view looks toward the leading hemisphere of Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) and the trailing hemisphere of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across). This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 11, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Janus and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Pandora. Scale is about 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on both moons.

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