This remarkably detailed view of Saturn's clouds reveals waves at the
northern boundary of the bright equatorial zone, presumably associated
both with the strong wind shear there and also the difference in density
across the boundary with the band to the north. The intense
eastward-flowing jet at the equator makes the edges of the equatorial
zone among the most strongly sheared on the planet.
To the south, two dark ovals embrace, while dark ring shadows blanket the
north. The moon Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) occupies a
mere two pixels beneath the rings, at right of center.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March
16, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 728 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 2 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn. The
image scale is 118 kilometers (73 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.