Saturn puts on a mesmerizing display in this image from August 7, 2004. Turbulent swirls and eddies are visible throughout the southern hemisphere. In particular, the boundary of the dark southern polar region displays a prominent oval-shaped storm near the lower right.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a distance of 8.4 million kilometers (5.2 million miles) from Saturn, through a filter sensitive to infrared light. The image scale is 50 kilometers (31 miles) 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 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
