Rings, Rhea and Janus

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Caption:

Saturn's rings occupy the foreground of this image. The small moon Janus appears to hover above, while the far larger moon Rhea is partially obscured by the rings.

Janus appears to be located directly over the rings, but the moon is actually further away, at a range of about 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from the Cassini spacecraft. Rhea is 1.6 million kilometers (994,000 miles) from the spacecraft. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) and the Saturn-facing side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across).

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2010. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Janus and 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Rhea.

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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