Turbulent Down South

This view of high southern latitudes on Saturn shows very linear clouds at top, usually indicative of stable prevailing winds, and two turbulent, swirling features farther south. It is possible that these features merged some time after this image was taken.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 6, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The image was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 16 kilometers (10 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 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