A lone moon hurtles past as the Cassini spacecraft stares into the clouds
of Saturn.
Cassini monitored clouds near Saturn's equator for nearly 20 hours during
an important series of observations designed to allow scientists to
measure wind speeds and better understand convection in the giant planet's
atmosphere.
Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) happened to wander across the
field of view during these observations.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July
28, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 3.1 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Saturn.
Image scale is 36 kilometers (22 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/home/index.cfm.
The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.