Stormy Pole

Saturn's north pole is littered with storms, as we see in this color view of the pole. A bit of the north polar hexagon is also visible at the upper-right.

Cassini scientists are looking forward to sunrise on this pole next year so that they can better study it in visible light.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this full color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 16, 2008 at a distance of approximately 673,000 kilometers (418,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 71 degrees. 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