Stepping Stone to Dione

The Cassini spacecraft captures Janus in the foreground, with Dione in the distance beyond.

The image was taken two hours after Hiding Dione, in which Cassini imaged Dione beyond the rings.

Janus is 181 kilometers (113 miles) across. Dione is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles) across. North on the moons is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (766,000 miles) from Janus and 1.6 million kilometers (970,000 miles) from Dione. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Janus and 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Dione.

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