CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
Such Great Heights

This close-up view of Saturn's turbulent atmosphere shows what may to be two vortices interacting. Some of the bright clouds in the scene appear to be casting dark shadows, suggesting they are at higher altitude than their surroundings.

The image was taken with the narrow angle camera on January 23, 2005, from a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 16 kilometers (10 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: March 2, 2005 (PIA 06596)
Image/Caption Information 		  Such Great Heights
PIA 06596
Avg Rating: 9/10

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