Several whirling storms churn through this scene from Saturn's atmosphere,
obtained by the Cassini spacecraft.
It is common on Saturn to see bright rings around dark atmospheric
vortices, as in this view. The large vortex at the upper right appears to
have material flowing either into or out of it.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Feb. 5, 2005, 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 750 nanometers. The image scale is 20
kilometers (12 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 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.
