Tiny Mimas is dwarfed by a huge white storm and dark waves on the edge of
a cloud band in Saturn's atmosphere.
Although the east-west winds on Saturn are stronger than on Earth or even
Jupiter, the contrast in appearance between these zones is more muted,
and the departures of the wind speeds from east to west are lower.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
Sept. 25, 2004, at a distance of 7.8 million kilometers (4.8 million
miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 46 kilometers (29
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 Cassini-Huygens 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 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.
