Peeking Over the Pole

Storms ringed by bright clouds swirl near the south pole of Saturn. This lateral view captures the bull's-eye pattern that surrounds the pole, where a monstrous, hurricane-like storm resides.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 12, 2007 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 354,000 kilometers (220,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 18 kilometers (11 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