With alternating light and dark bands, Saturn's south pole looks something like an upside-down layer cake in this view, taken on Aug. 10, 2004. The disturbed boundaries between the bands demonstrate that winds move at different speeds at different latitudes on the gas giant.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera at a distance of 8.6 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light. The image scale is 51 kilometers (32 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 Cassini-Huygens 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
