CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS
At the Center

The north pole of Saturn sits at the center of its own domain. Around it swirl the clouds, driven by the fast winds of Saturn. Beyond that orbits Saturn's retinue of moons and the countless small particles that form the ring.

Although the poles of Saturn are at the center of all of this motion, not everything travels around them in circles. Some of the jet-stream patterns, such as the hexagon-shaped pattern seen here, have wavy, uneven shapes. The moons as well have orbits that are elliptical, some quite far from circular.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 26 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 2, 2016 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 890 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 619,000 miles (996,000 kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 37 miles (60 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini Solstice 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 Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Released: February 27, 2017 (PIA 20520)
Image/Caption Information 		  At the Center
PIA 20520
Avg Rating: 9.45/10

Full Size 1020x1020:
JPEG 119 KB
PNG 227 KB
TIFF 357 KB