Where Clouds Meet

March 9, 2005

This image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows an assortment of vortices and wavy interfaces where air masses moving at different speeds intersect.

This Cassini image shows an assortment of vortices and wavy interfaces where air masses moving at different speeds intersect. Bright, narrow and linear cloud features of the north appear to be moving over darker clouds below. The linear pattern suggests very stable atmospheric flow conditions at these altitudes.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 5, 2005, at a distance of approximately 3.4 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 20 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 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.

Where Clouds Meet

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