On its approach to Saturn orbit insertion, the narrow angle camera on the
Cassini spacecraft snapped this image of a turbulent swirl in the high
clouds of Saturn's atmosphere. The disturbance occurs in the southern
edge of the equatorial band. The image was taken on May 21, 2004, from
a distance of 22 million kilometers (13.7 million miles) from Saturn
through a filter centered at 889 nanometers. The image scale is 131
kilometers (81 miles) per pixel. Contrast in the image was 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.