The Cassini spacecraft looks toward giant Saturn and its moon Tethys,
while a large and powerful storm rages in the planet's southern
hemisphere. The storm was observed by the Cassini spacecraft beginning in
late Jan. 2006, and was at the time large and bright enough to be seen
using modest-sized telescopes on Earth.
The fact that the storm stands out against the subtle banding of Saturn
at visible wavelengths suggests that the storm's cloud tops are relatively
high in the atmosphere.
Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.8
million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 162
kilometers (101 miles) per pixel on Saturn.
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.
