In the Boundary

A chevron-shaped pattern and bright vortices stand out in the turbulent Saturnian atmosphere. Such features are hallmarks of the boundary between alternating east-west flowing cloud bands.

The view looks toward an area about 9 degrees south of the planet's equator.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 28, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 889 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3.1 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 37 kilometers (23 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