Storm Alley's latest, greatest resident, the recent lightning-producing
storm seen by the Cassini spacecraft and Earth-based observers churns
away. Turbulent eddies to the west (left) of the storm indicate that it
is moving eastward relative to the westward-flowing winds at this latitude
on Saturn.
Scientists gave the nickname "Storm Alley" to the area around 35 degrees
south latitude because of the large amount of activity seen there from the
beginning of the Cassini spacecraft's approach to Saturn in early 2004.
The region has spawned two large and powerful storms since the Cassini
spacecraft began observations.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on
Feb. 16, 2006, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light
centered at 750 nanometers, and 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.
