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Whirlwinds of Saturn

Oct. 23, 2007
Incredible gales blow in Saturn's twisted atmosphere. Winds in this region of Saturn have been measured at greater than 360 kilometers per hour, faster than the most powerful hurricanes on Earth. This image was obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Incredible gales blow in Saturn's twisted atmosphere. Winds in this region of Saturn have been measured at greater than 360 kilometers (225 miles) per hour, faster than the most powerful hurricanes on Earth.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 17, 2007, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 21 kilometers (13 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.

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