This image from Cassini shows details in the alternating light and dark bands in Saturn's southern hemisphere. Visible details in this image are a dark, curved ribbon near upper left, and an elliptical dark spot with attached streamers above and left of center.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Sept. 25, 2004, at a distance of 7.7 million kilometers (4.8 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 46 kilometers (29 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
