New hues are creeping into Saturn's northern cloud bands as winter gives
way to spring there.
During its first four years of exploration, Cassini has made the Saturn
system a familiar place to us Earthlings. The intrepid craft has returned
more than 150,000 images since arriving in orbit in mid-2004. In this
natural color image, the blues and grays of Saturn's northern hemisphere,
so striking in early Cassini images, are diminishing in intensity with the
slow change of seasons on Saturn, and are almost imperceptibly being
replaced by pale shades of the colors commonly seen by Cassini in the
planet's southern hemisphere.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about less than a
degree below the ring plane. Images taken using red, green and blue
spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The
images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on
April 23, 2008, at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers
(740,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 68 kilometers (42 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.
