This detail shows swirls and shoals in Saturn's cloud bands near the planet's south pole.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on July 25, 2004, at a distance of 7.1 million kilometers (4.4 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 42 kilometers (26 miles) per pixel. Contrast was enhanced to bring out features in the atmosphere.
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 Cassini-Huygens 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
