PIA09867: Flowing Cloud Bands


Flowing Cloud Bands

Caption:

The Cassini spacecraft observes the swirling features in Saturn's northern cloud bands. Ring-cast shadows darken the planet's northern hemisphere at increasingly lower latitudes.

In late 2004, not long after Cassini arrived in orbit (see PIA06177 ), the shadows extended much farther north. Their southerly slide continues as the seasons change on Saturn.

This view is centered on 25 degrees north latitude and was acquired from about 39 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (716,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 65 kilometers (41 miles) per pixel.

Background Info:

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/home/index.cfm . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Saturn
System Saturn
Target Type Planet
Mission Cassini-Huygens
Instrument Host Cassini Orbiter
Host Type Orbiter
Instrument Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
Detector Wide Angle Camera
Extra Keywords Disk, Grayscale, Infrared, Shadow, Visual
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2008-03-27
Date in Caption 2008-02-18
Image Credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09867
Identifier PIA09867