Saturn's Active Atmosphere

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, Posted on: Thursday, 2 October 2008, 06:15 CDT Download full size image

Saturn's high north is a seething cauldron of activity filled with roiling cloud bands and swirling vortices. A corner of the North Polar Hexagon is seen at upper left.

This view looks toward a region located about 70 degrees north of the planet's equator, in a place that receives continually increasing amounts of sunlight as Saturn's seasons change.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 25, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 541,000 kilometers (336,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 29 kilometers (18 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.

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