Janus: Down South

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Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft snapped this exquisite, close-up view of Saturn's moon Janus, looking toward the south polar region, on Feb. 20, 2008.

Janus is 181 kilometers (113 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 169,000 kilometers (105,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 71 degrees. Image scale is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) per pixel.

Background Info:

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 .

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