Catalog Page for PIA06657

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PIA06657: Close Look at the Pole

NASA's Cassini spacecraft peeks at Saturn's relatively dark south pole, providing an up-close look at the haze-free upper atmosphere there.

Target Name:	Saturn
Is a satellite of:	Sol (our sun)
Mission:	Cassini-Huygens
Spacecraft:	Cassini Orbiter
Instrument:	ISS - Narrow Angle
Product Size:	1008 x 1008 pixels (w x h)
Produced By:	Cassini Imaging Team
Primary Data Set:	Cassini
Full-Res TIFF:	PIA06657.tif (1.017 MB)
Full-Res JPEG:	PIA06657.jpg (92.99 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Cassini peeks at Saturn's relatively dark south pole, providing an up-close look at the haze-free upper atmosphere there.

The banded structure around the pole seems to be superimposed on the characteristic high-latitude, mottled, turbulent structure (the white puffs of cloud near the pole), suggesting that the banding is a shallow, not deep, feature.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 23, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of polarized infrared light at a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 14 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Addition Date:

2005-05-26