With no solid land to obstruct their progress, dark vortices often roll
through Saturn's atmosphere for months or years, before merging with other
vortices. On Earth, the continents usually halt the progress of large
storms, like hurricanes.
Vortices like these are part of the general circulation pattern of
east-west flowing cloud bands, called jets, on Saturn.
The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The image was obtained with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 16, 2006 at a distance of
approximately 259,000 kilometers (161,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 12 kilometers (7 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.