An oval-shaped feature, wider than Earth and with streamers extending out
to the east and west, swirls in Saturn's southern hemisphere. Like the
rainbands of a Southern Hemisphere hurricane on Earth, the streamers
spiral into the feature in a clockwise direction. Unlike Earth's
hurricanes, this storm probably contains no liquid water.
The planet's equatorial rings cut across the top of the image.
The image was taken in wavelengths of polarized infrared light with the
Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 30, 2005, at a distance of
approximately 324,000 kilometers (202,000 miles) from Saturn. The image
scale is 32 kilometers (20 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. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
