Details observed in Saturn's south polar region demonstrate that this
area is far from featureless. Lighter colored clouds dot the entire
region, which is dominated by a central, sharply-defined circular feature.
Movie sequences in which these features are captured and followed will
allow wind speeds in the polar region to be measured.
This image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft's narrow angle camera on
May 20, 2004, from a distance of 22 million kilometers (13.7 million
miles) from Saturn through a filter centered at 750 nanometers. The image
scale is 131 kilometers (81 miles) per pixel. Contrast in the image was
enhanced and magnified 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 imaging team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
