Mesmerizing Meanders

a closeup of Saturn's turbulent atmosphere
PIA NumberPIA07605
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The thin and meandering ribbon-like filaments seen here are much like those seen in PIA07594, indicative of two-dimensional turbulence.

Contrast in the image was enhanced to aid the visibility of atmospheric features.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately 417,000 kilometers (259,000 miles) from Saturn using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The image scale is 21 kilometers (13 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 .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute