Sidelong at Saturn

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the Saturnian horizon as Dione and Janus glide past.

A few craters are visible on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across). Janus (181 kilometers, or113 miles across) is slightly blurred due to its motion during the exposure.

The rings appear essentially edge-on in this view, as the Cassini spacecraft continues its recent activities close to the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 10, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 17 kilometers (11 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