Saturn's south pole, seen here by the Cassini spacecraft, is in twilight
as Saturn nears equinox (August 2009). Soon, the pole will enter its
15-year-long night.
This mosaic consists of four images that were digitally reprojected onto a
computer model of Saturn, and aligned there, in order to account for the
spacecraft's motion and the planet's rotation.
The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on
Nov. 18, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared
light centered at 728 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of
approximately 869,000 kilometers (540,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 37 degrees. Mosaic scale is 49
kilometers (30 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
