The clouds of Saturn swirl, billow and merge. These bands are layered into
stratified cloud decks consisting of droplets of ammonia, ammonium
hydrosulfide and water set aloft in a sea of hydrogen and helium.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a
spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728
nanometers. Cassini's specialized camera filters allow unparalleled views
of Saturn's raging, banded atmosphere.
Cassini obtained the image on Dec. 1, 2006 at a distance of approximately
856,000 kilometers (532,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 48
kilometers (30 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.
