The Cassini spacecraft has a peek beneath the hazes in Saturn's upper
atmosphere at the swirling vortices that lurk below.
Many vortices can be seen in this image, varying in size from small to
large. The largest one in this image exhibits a collar of bright clouds
surrounding the central dark core.
The view is centered on a region 46 degrees south of the planet's equator.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Aug. 12, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 4.1 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 24 kilometers (15 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.