CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Saturn from Below

Cassini looks upward at the swirling clouds of Saturn's southern hemisphere. The C and B rings are seen at right, beyond the planet's nightside limb.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 48 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 27, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 609,000 kilometers (378,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 33 kilometers (20 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. 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 Equinox Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: October 16, 2008 (PIA 10492)
Image/Caption Information 		  Saturn from Below
PIA 10492
Avg Rating: 8.70/10

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Alliance Member Comments
Red_dragon (Oct 17, 2008 at 2:20 PM):
Truly great: one of the best images to show Saturn's ominosity. Well done.