The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the south pole and cratered surface of
Saturn's moon Janus.
The pole of Janus lies on the terminator about one-third of the way inward
from the bottom of the image. This view is centered on terrain at 42
degrees south latitude, 32 degrees west longitude. Lit terrain seen here
is on the Saturn-facing side of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles
across).
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on July 26, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance
of approximately 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) from Janus and at a
Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale is 600
meters (1,968 feet) 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.