Storms on the Border

Vortices on Saturn
October 15, 2007
PIA NumberPIA09749
Language
  • english

Large vortices edge their way along the turbulent boundary between east-west flowing cloud bands.

The view is centered on a region 22 degrees south of Saturn's equator.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 15, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 23 kilometers (14 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