Cloud Phantoms

Bright, circular cloud features waltz through the turbid atmosphere of Saturn in this Cassini spacecraft view.

Several jets/bands appear in this image (center and upper right). In contrast to the circular cloud features, these clouds appear thin and linear.

The image was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 8, 2007 at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 17 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 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute