A chef's bounty of colors is represented in this full color view of
Saturn's northern hemisphere. Butternut, peach, and olive hues have
replaced the azure blue of winter.
The blue of Saturn's winter hemisphere during the early Cassini prime
mission still remains a puzzle. Over the course of time, the blue color
has faded and has been replaced with bands of other hues (see PIA11141).
This picture is a combination of images taken in red, green and blue light
with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 1, 2009. The view
was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers
(680,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase,
angle of 28 degrees. Image scale is 65 kilometers (40 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.
