This image shows the unexpected "hot spot" at Saturn's north pole.
Scientists were surprised to find that the north pole, despite being in
winter darkness for more than a decade, is home to a hot, cyclonic vortex
very similar to that found on Saturn's much sunnier south pole.
Created with data from the Cassini spacecraft's composite infrared
spectrometer, this image, centered on the north pole, shows temperatures
in Saturn's northern hemisphere near its 100-millibar tropopause, the top
of its convective layer.
The false color denotes temperatures from 72 to 84 Kelvin (about 330 to
310 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). Latitudes are displayed from 30
degrees N at the edges to the north pole in the center. The hot pole is
clear at the center of the projection. The distinctive polar hexagon is
also evident in the initial warm "ring" around the pole between 75 and 80
degrees North latitude.
Although there is a similar hot pole in the southern hemisphere, there is
no hexagon and the atmosphere is otherwise much warmer than in the north,
having been heated during Saturn's southern summer for over a decade.
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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The
composite infrared spectrometer team is based at NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The composite infrared spectrometer
team homepage is http://cirs.gsfc.nasa.gov/.
