Saturn's north pole retains its bluish hue in this true color Cassini
image, even as northern winter is coming to an end.
The azure blue of Saturn's winter hemisphere during the early Cassini
prime mission still remains a puzzle. Over the course of time, the blue
color has faded and has been replaced with bands of other hues (see
PIA11141).
The north pole is in shadow here, but a portion of its oscillating
hexagonal pattern is visible. Storms create the look of a pockmarked
surface.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 29, 2008 at a distance of
approximately 1.098 million kilometers (683,000 miles) from Saturn and at
a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 38 degrees. Image scale is 62
kilometers (39 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.
