Saturn Gets in the Way

The Cassini spacecraft continued to track Saturn's moon Prometheus after it disappeared behind the planet, capturing a few fortunate, high-resolution views of the clouds in Saturn's high north.

Tracking the Shepherd was taken an hour earlier, just before the moon vanished behind Saturn. Later, when Prometheus reappeared from behind the planet, Cassini was waiting to take more images.

The view is centered on a region located about 70 degrees north of Saturn's equator. North is toward the top of the image and rotated 28 degrees to the right. The vortices seen here are among the swarm of bright spots seen in Angles in the Atmosphere, just south of the north polar hexagon.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 9, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 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