Round Vortex

This close-up view of Saturn's atmosphere shows a circular vortex surrounded by numerous attendant bright clouds.

Some blurring due to spacecraft motion is apparent in this view.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 3, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 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