Seasonal twilight is approaching for Saturn's south polar vortex—the
giant hurricane-like storm swirling around the planet's southern pole.
When the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in mid-2004, summer was
ending in the southern hemisphere and most of the polar region south of 60
degrees latitude was in sunlight (see PIA06477). In the intervening
years, Saturn has moved along in its 29-year orbit, and the Sun's rays
have moved farther north. This seasonal change will eventually bring
darkness to the southern poles of Saturn and its moons, but it will also
bring their northern poles into the light.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug.
27, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 542,000 kilometers (337,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 29 kilometers (18 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.
