Janus’ Pole Crater

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Caption:

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.

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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