Turbulent swirls churn in Saturn's atmosphere while the planet's rings
form a dazzling backdrop. The rings' complex structure is clearly evident
in this view.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
June 15, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 727 nanometers at a distance of approximately 2.4 million
kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft,
or phase, angle of 72 degrees. The image scale is 28 kilometers (17 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.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
