Cassini captured intriguing cloud structures on Saturn as it neared its
rendezvous with the gas giant. Notable is the irregularity in the eastern
edge of the dark southern polar collar. The image was taken with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on May 21, 2004, from a distance
of 22 million kilometers (13.7 million miles) from Saturn through a
filter sensitive to absorption and scattering of sunlight in the near
infrared by methane gas (centered at 727 nanometers). The image scale is
131 kilometers (81 miles) per pixel. No contrast enhancement has been
performed on this image.
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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space
Science, 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.
