Shadows of Janus

The Cassini spacecraft catches a hint of topography on Janus, which orbits Saturn just outside the planet's narrow F ring.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 12 degrees above the ringplane. Janus is 179 kilometers (111 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 14, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 22 degrees. Image scale is 9 kilometers (6 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