CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Janus Rides the Rings

Cassini was nearly in the plane of Saturn's rings when it took this image of Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across). The nearly edge-on rings appear almost ribbonlike in this view, and some surface detail is visible on the small moon.

The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on February 18, 2005, from a distance of approximately 911,000 kilometers (566,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 101 degrees. The image scale is 5 kilometers (3 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: March 24, 2005 (PIA 06612)
Image/Caption Information 		  Janus Rides the Rings
PIA 06612
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