Saturn's Silhouetted Clouds

 

This false-color mosaic of Saturn shows deep-level clouds silhouetted

against Saturn's glowing interior. The image was made with data from

Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, which can image the

planet at 352 different wavelengths.

 

 

This mosaic shows the entire planet, including features like Saturn's ring

shadows and the terminator, the boundary between day and night.

 

 

The data were obtained in February 2006 at a distance of 1.6 million

kilometers (1 million miles) from directly over the plane of Saturn's

rings, which appear here as a thin, blue line over the equator. The image

was constructed from images taken at wavelengths of 1.07 microns shown in

blue, 2.71 microns shown in green, and 5.02 microns shown in red.

 

 

The blue-green color (lower right) is sunlight scattered off clouds high

in Saturn's atmosphere and the red color (upper left) is the glow of

thermal radiation from Saturn's warm interior, easily seen on Saturn's

night side (top left), within the shadow of the rings, and with somewhat

less contrast on Saturn's day side (bottom right). The darker areas within

Saturn show the strongest thermal radiation. The bright red color

indicates areas where Saturn's atmosphere is relatively clear. The great

variety of cloud shapes and sizes reveals a surprisingly active planet

below the overlying sun-scattering haze.

 

 

The brighter glow of the northern hemisphere versus the southern indicates

that the clouds and hazes there are noticeably thinner than those in the

south. Scientists speculate that this is a seasonal effect, and if so, it

will change as the northern hemisphere enters springtime during the next

few years.

 

 

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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Visual

and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team is based at the University of

Arizona where this image was produced.

 

 

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov The visual and infrared mapping

spectrometer team homepage is at wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu.

 

 

credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Done