This false-color mosaic of Saturn shows deep-level clouds silhouetted
against Saturn's glowing interior. The image was made with data from
Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, which can image the
planet at 352 different wavelengths.
This mosaic shows the entire planet, including features like Saturn's ring
shadows and the terminator, the boundary between day and night.
The data were obtained in February 2006 at a distance of 1.6 million
kilometers (1 million miles) from directly over the plane of Saturn's
rings, which appear here as a thin, blue line over the equator. The image
was constructed from images taken at wavelengths of 1.07 microns shown in
blue, 2.71 microns shown in green, and 5.02 microns shown in red.
The blue-green color (lower right) is sunlight scattered off clouds high
in Saturn's atmosphere and the red color (upper left) is the glow of
thermal radiation from Saturn's warm interior, easily seen on Saturn's
night side (top left), within the shadow of the rings, and with somewhat
less contrast on Saturn's day side (bottom right). The darker areas within
Saturn show the strongest thermal radiation. The bright red color
indicates areas where Saturn's atmosphere is relatively clear. The great
variety of cloud shapes and sizes reveals a surprisingly active planet
below the overlying sun-scattering haze.
The brighter glow of the northern hemisphere versus the southern indicates
that the clouds and hazes there are noticeably thinner than those in the
south. Scientists speculate that this is a seasonal effect, and if so, it
will change as the northern hemisphere enters springtime during the next
few years.
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.
