A great vortex rolls through high southern latitudes on Saturn, whirling twisted
contours into the clouds. The ringed planet's uppermost clouds are thought to
be composed largely of ammonia ice overlying deeper layers of ammonium
hydrosulfide and water clouds.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May
13, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.8 million miles)
from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 143 degrees.
The image was obtained using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 938 nanometers. Image scale is 17 kilometers (10 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.