Cloudflow

Saturn's atmosphere
August 5, 2008
PIA NumberPIA10440
Language
  • english

The Cassini spacecraft observes wispy whorls and streams of clouds as they flow across the face of Saturn. A line of vortices churns across the top of the scene.

This image was taken just over an hour after Dual Vortices and shows a region slightly to the southwest of the earlier view. The circular vortex seen at right in the earlier view appears in the top right corner here.

Contrast in this image was strongly enhanced.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 20, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (775,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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