A large crater on Saturn's tiny moon Janus is distinctly visible in this
Cassini spacecraft image.
Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Janus (179
kilometers, or 111 miles across). North on Janus is up and rotated 7
degrees to the left.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on March 5, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Janus and at
a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 53 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel. The image has been
magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.
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.