Saturn's atmosphere comes alive with a multitude of dark vortices swirling
through the southern hemisphere.
Vortices are long-lived features that are part of the general circulation
of Saturn's atmosphere. Vortices are thought to be caused by the shear
between eastward- and westward-flowing jets -- the alternating bands
flowing past each other in the atmosphere. The vortices can last for
months or years and probably grow by merging with other vortices until a
few dominate a particular zone of wind shear between two jets.
The vortex at upper right is one of the largest vortices on Saturn.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Feb. 16, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2
million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 19 kilometers (12 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/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
