Contorted clouds wriggle across high northern latitudes in this
exquisitely detailed close-up of Saturn's atmosphere. Two immense storms
swirl at right, each easily 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) across.
The wispy, swirling nature of the bright clouds is reminiscent of cloud
material being dumped into the cloud-level atmosphere by convective
updrafts that come up from below, with the local shear and turbulence then
creating the patterns seen, like a dye marker injected into a flowing
stream.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on April 5, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.4
million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 8
kilometers (5 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.
