Racing ‘Round the North

The Cassini spacecraft studies the dynamics of Saturn's blustery cloud bands as spring approaches in the northern hemisphere.

Janus casts its shadow onto Saturn at right, just above the curving shadow of the rings.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 9 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 19, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (786,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 72 kilometers (45 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