This Cassini image shows a bright storm that appeared in mid-September at the latitude of one of the rare westward jets on Saturn. This latitude band has come to be called "Storm Alley" by Cassini imaging scientists because of the large amount of activity seen there during 2004.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Sept. 18, 2004, at a distance of 8.3 million kilometers (5.2 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to visible blue light. The image scale is 49 kilometers (30 miles) per pixel. The mottling in the image is an artifact.
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
