There is much to examine in detailed close-ups like this one of Saturn's
atmosphere. Scientists are particularly interested in the bright, and in
some places turbulent-looking, thin boundary between the large-scale
features in the upper half of the image. The characteristic features of
this thin boundary might be suggestive of a place where convection is
occurring. Convection in Saturn's atmosphere occurs when sufficiently
warm air at deeper levels rises to levels where it becomes less dense than
the surrounding air.
Coverage on Saturn extends here from 18 degrees south to 50 degrees south
latitude. Contrast in the image was enhanced to aid the visibility of
atmospheric features.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug.
19, 2005, at a distance of approximately 487,000 kilometers (302,000
miles) from Saturn using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 752 nanometers. The image scale is 25 kilometers (16
miles) per pixel.
Cassini pans across a landscape shaped by eons of impacts, revealing the
dark-floored craters at high resolution. The trip to Hyperion ends as the
movie pans away from the battered moon's darkened limb.
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.
