NASA Cassini Image: A Dark Duo
Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across, at right) and Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across, at left) are lit here by reflected “greylight” from Saturn. The Sun brightens only thin slivers of the moons’ surfaces.
A few large craters on Janus are visible in the dim light of Saturn.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 29, 2005 a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from both moons. Resolution in the original image was 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced 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 .
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
