Cassini continues its vigil as Saturn's atmosphere churns and morphs
through time. Four large, dark spots, or storms, form a symmetrical
pattern in the mid-southern latitudes as these features squeeze past
each other. Further observations will show whether these storms merge
or spawn new spots of their own. North of the features, some latitudinal
bands exhibit a bumpy or scalloped pattern, probably indicative of
planet-scale wave motions in the atmosphere.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft's narrow angle camera on
May 15, 2004, from a distance of 24.7 million kilometers (15.3 million
miles) from Saturn through a filter centered at 750 nanometers. The image
scale is 147 kilometers (91 miles) per pixel. Contrast in the image
enhanced to aid visibility.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras, were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
