Three big vortices swirling through Saturn’s southern latitudes. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Click to enlarge
Three giant storms swirl across the atmosphere of Saturn in this photograph taken by Cassini – the two in the upper part of the photo appear to be interacting. This image was taken by Cassini on April 15 when the spacecraft was approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Saturn.
Three large and impressive vortices, including two that appear to be interacting, are captured here as they swirl through Saturn’s active southern latitudes.
This view shows latitudes slightly to the north of those seen in Round and Round They Go and was taken a few minutes prior to the left side image in that release.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The image was acquired on April 15, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 23 kilometers (14 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 .
Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release