A Cassini spacecraft image captures a bright, oblong storm swirling high
through the middle latitudes of the southern hemisphere.
The image was taken through a spectral filter centered on wavelengths of
light that are strongly absorbed by methane gas. Hence, any light making
it through this filter to the camera's detector has bounced off clouds
that are high in the atmosphere, making them visible, while light passing
through the cloud-free surroundings gets absorbed by the methane gas there
before it reaches the lower clouds.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan.
5, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared
light centered at 890 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of
approximately 711,000 kilometers (442,000 miles) from Saturn and at a
Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 106 degrees. Image scale is 39
kilometers (24 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.
