Saturn's whirling vortices and feathery cloud bands are the signs of a
restless world. Cassini captured this arresting view of the giant planet
scored by bold shadows cast by the rings. The rings are seen edge-on in
this dramatic, artfully tilted scene.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March
6, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1 million
miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 750 nanometers. The image scale is 10 kilometers (6
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 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.
