Scarred Janus

Saturn's battered moon Janus wears the record of its long history of impacts.

Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) orbits just beyond the outer reaches of Saturn's A and F rings, which are seen here.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 4 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 28, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (703,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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