CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Three Views of Saturn

Three Views of Saturn
PIA 07590
Avg Rating: 8.95/10

Full Size 507x500:
Quicktime 3.0 MB
GIF 1.8 MB
MP4 movie 726 KB

Half Size 254x250:
Quicktime 911 KB
GIF 357 KB
   This unique movie, showing Saturn's rotation in three different spectral filters, demonstrates Cassini's ability to probe various levels within the planet's outer cloud layers.

From left to right, the three panes show the atmosphere at infrared wavelengths 752, 728 and 890 nanometers. The filter used at left is seeing the "deep cloud" layer, which has the most features in any Cassini view. The filter at right shows the highest altitude cloud layers.

Cassini's powerful cameras reveal atmospheric processes beneath the layer visible to the human eye, but these views show only the thinnest outer skin of the planet, whose radius is about 60,000 kilometers (37,000 miles). The altitude difference between the left and right panels is estimated to be in the range of 30 to 100 kilometers (20 to 60 miles).

Although the left and center panels sample wavelengths that are relatively close together, the different morphology seen in these panels shows that the two filters are sampling different heights.

The movie covers a period of about 95 minutes and consists of 31 images in each of the three panes. One Saturn rotation is about 10.7 hours long (determined by the rotation of the planet's magnetic field).

The movie has been compressed to decrease the overall file size, and as a result, some small artifacts are present. However, all of the large-scale features visible here are real.

Cassini captured the images comprising this movie with its wide angle camera on June 21, 2005 from a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles). The image scale is about 125 kilometers (78 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 imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in 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.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: September 20, 2005 (PIA 07590)
Image/Caption Information