This close-up view of Saturn's turbulent atmosphere shows what may be two
vortices interacting. Some of the bright clouds in the scene appear to be
casting dark shadows, suggesting they are at higher altitude than their
surroundings.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
Jan. 23, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7
million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 16
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 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.
