Saturn's north polar hexagon appears to be a long-lived feature of the
atmosphere, having been spotted in images of Saturn in the early 1980s,
again in the 1990s, and then by the Cassini spacecraft in the past several
years.
The persistent nature of the hexagon in imaging observations implies that
it is present throughout Saturn's 29-year seasonal cycle. Two sides of the
hexagon are seen here.
This view was obtained from about 67 degrees above the equator. The image
was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 25, 2008
using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 566,000 kilometers (352,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 31 kilometers (19 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/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.