Swirls of Clouds in Infrared
On its final approach to orbit insertion, Cassini snapped this image of a turbulent swirl in the high clouds of Saturn’s atmosphere. The disturbance occurs in the southern edge of the equatorial band. The image was taken on May 21, 2004 from a distance of 22 million kilometers (13.7 million miles) from Saturn through a filter centered at 889 nanometers. The image scale is 131 kilometers (81 miles) per pixel. Contrast in the image was enhanced to aid visibility.
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 Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: Jun 15, 2004 (PIA 05406) |
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