The Northern Pole of Janus

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Here’s one of the latest Cassini image releases.  This is the north pole of the little moon of Janus.  I would imagine north is so called, because of the right-hand-rule.

The Right Hand Rule:  take your right hand and point the thumb up.  Curl your fingers around like they are around a ball.  The thumb points north and the fingers point the rotation of a planet or moon, it also points the normal orbits of moons around planets and planets around the Sun.

When you hear of a retrograde motion like in Venus, it means that this rotation would put the north pole pointing to a “southerly” direction compared to the “normal” and the rotation is to the west.

I have really milky skies and it’s breezy.  I am banking on the wind dying and the sky clearing because I am opening up the observatory one way or the other!  BTW:  At least it is dry, hopefully things for my friends in the south are drying out too.

Here’s the press release that came with the image:

On a high-inclination orbit of Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft gazes down at the north polar region of Janus.

This view looks toward Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) from a perspective 72 degrees north of the moon’s equator. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 14, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 259,000 kilometers (161,000 miles) from Janus and at a Sun-Janus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 78 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (5,085 feet) per pixel.

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.