CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Saturn's Layered Bands

Saturn's Layered Bands
PIA 06484
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   With alternating light and dark bands, Saturn's south pole looks something like an upside-down layer cake in this view, taken on August 10, 2004. The disturbed boundaries between the bands demonstrate that winds move at different speeds at different latitudes on the gas giant.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera from a distance of 8.6 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 51 kilometers (32 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 24, 2004 (PIA 06484)
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