The region near Saturn's south pole shows a great deal of fascinating detail in this view from Cassini. Near upper right, an oval-shaped storm is bordered to the north and south by bright streaks of cloud, and two dark storms hover in a brighter cloud lane near the center.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Aug. 7, 2004, at a distance of 8.4 million kilometers (5.2 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 50 kilometers (31 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 Cassini-Huygens 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute