Saturn's Rings with Moons Janus & Titan | NASA Cassini Mission

Saturn's Rings with Moons Janus & Titan | NASA Cassini Mission

Planet Saturn's Titan moon and tiny Janus moon almost appear to be embedded within Saturn's rings from the viewpoint of NASA's Cassini spacecraft. 

Janus is an inner satellite of Saturn. It is also known as Saturn X. It is named after the mythological Roman god, Janus. This natural satellite was first identified by French astronomer Audouin Dollfus on December 15, 1966, although it had been unknowingly photographed earlier by French optical engineer, Jean Texereau. 

Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and is the second largest moon in our solar system. Jupiter's moon Ganymede is just a little bit larger (by about 2 percent). Titan’s atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, like Earth’s, but with a surface pressure 50 percent higher than Earth’s. Titan has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. The largest seas are hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles wide. Beneath Titan’s thick crust of water ice is more liquid—an ocean primarily of water rather than methane. Titan’s subsurface water could be a place to harbor life as we know it, while its surface lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons could conceivably harbor life that uses different chemistry than we are used to—that is, life as we do not yet know it. 

NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived in the Saturn system in 2004 and ended its mission in 2017 by deliberately plunging into Saturn's atmosphere. This method was chosen because it is necessary to ensure protection and prevent biological contamination to any of the moons of Saturn thought to offer potential habitability.

The Cassini-Huygens mission was a cooperative project of NASA, European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. The Cassini radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the U.S. and several European countries.

NASA's Cassini Mission: 
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/cassini

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS

Processing: Kevin M. Gill
Image Date: March 21, 2006
Release Date: Dec. 31, 2024

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