Rippling with detail, the southern hemisphere of Saturn comes to life in
this view from the Cassini spacecraft. Long, flowing streamers and bands
of great contrast soften toward the pole, where a great hurricane-like
storm resides.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a
spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 890
nanometers. The image was taken on Feb. 1, 2007 at a distance of
approximately 945,000 kilometers (587,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 53 kilometers (33 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.
