This false-color image of Saturn shows ring shadows running across the
upper portion of the planet, and sunlight illuminating the lower portion
of the planet.
The upper area, in the ring shadow, would be black in visible light but
glows red in infrared because Saturn is warm inside. This light shines out
through the clouds, giving scientists a look at some of Saturn's
interesting atmospheric structure.
This image was taken on June 30, 2006, with Cassini's visual and infrared
mapping spectrometer. It was constructed from images taken at wavelengths
of 0.91 microns shown in blue, 2.25 microns shown in green, and at 5.01
microns shown in red. The distance from Cassini to Saturn's center in this
image is 335,000 kilometers (208,159 miles).
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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Visual
and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team is based at the University of
Arizona where this image was produced.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm The visual and infrared mapping
spectrometer team homepage is at http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu.
