This close-up view of Saturn's atmosphere shows a circular vortex
surrounded by numerous attendant bright clouds.
Some blurring due to spacecraft motion is apparent in this view.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Jan. 3, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.3
million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 15
kilometers (9 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.