Intricate undulations and swirls within the banded atmosphere of Saturn
give scientists clues to the processes occurring there.
The lower part of the image shows the characteristic billows that form at
the turbulent boundary between two air masses of different densities
moving at different speeds. This can be contrasted with the dark band
just to the north that shows linear features moving in an apparently
stable region with no obvious turbulent mixing from north to south. The
bright band farther north appears to have the same morphology.
At the top of the image, a dark oval-shaped storm resides in a band where
a chevron pattern dominates. The chevron pattern is suggestive of a place
where momentum is being redistributed in Saturn's atmosphere.
The image of Saturn's southern hemisphere was taken with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow angle camera on Dec. 6, 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.
