Myriad dark vortices, some large and some small, twirl in the high
southern latitudes of Saturn. At left, the south polar vortex spins at the
center of it all.
This view looks toward the planet's southern hemisphere from about 47
degrees below the equator. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on June 23, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to
wavelengths of infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The view was
acquired at a distance of approximately 468,000 kilometers (291,000 miles)
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.