Lanes of cold gas in Saturn's mostly hydrogen atmosphere brush past each
other, often creating spectacular patterns like those seen here. The
whirling shapes near the bottom of this view suggest turbulent
interactions between latitudinal regions of different densities moving
at different speeds, while the long, linear shapes in the lanes above
suggest more stable conditions in the flow there.
The image of Saturn's southern hemisphere was taken with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow angle camera on Dec. 5, 2004, at a distance of
approximately 3.4 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn
through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at
727 nanometers. The image scale is 40 kilometers (25 miles) per pixel.
Contrast was enhanced to aid visibility of features in the atmosphere.
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 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.
