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3-D Clouds

Feb. 21, 2005
Clouds near the boundary of day and night on Saturn show unusual three-dimensional structure in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Clouds near the boundary of day and night on Saturn show unusual three-dimensional structure in this Cassini view. At this location on the planet, the Sun is at a very low angle, causing vertical relief to become apparent. Generally, Cassini imaging scientists use specially designed spectral filters to probe the vertical structure of the gas giant's atmosphere.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Jan. 16, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2.8 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Saturn. North is to the upper right. The image scale is 17 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

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