These two Cassini images taken 23 minutes apart show many vortices and
turbulent wakes in Saturn's atmosphere. They also show the overall
filamentary structure of the flow in the atmosphere. Many of the narrow
cloud streaks that extend and curl over great distances maintain their
integrity, rather than mixing with neighboring air parcels. This type of
behavior is a characteristic of what scientists call "two-dimensional
turbulence."
In two-dimensional turbulence, the patterns in flowing fluids, such as the
gases in an atmosphere, can behave rather like the patterns seen in a
thin, soapy or oily film floating on water. These systems have little
relative thickness and involve very different physics than
three-dimensional turbulent systems.
Contrast in the images was enhanced to aid the visibility of atmospheric
features.
The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on Aug. 20, 2005, at a mean distance of approximately
484,000 kilometers (301,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is about
26 kilometers (16 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
