28 Feb 2017

The north pole of Saturn in a picture by the NASA-ESA-ASI spacecraft

A spacecraft speeding through the solar system 619,000 miles from Saturn snapped a photo of the ringed planet's north pole in stark relief. The new image, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 2, 2016, shows Saturn's strange hexagonal jet stream surrounding the strong hurricane at the pole.
The north pole of Saturn sits at the center of its own domain. Around it swirl the clouds, driven by the fast winds of Saturn. Beyond that orbits Saturn's retinue of moons and the countless small particles that form the ring.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 26 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 890 nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 996,000 kilometers from Saturn. Image scale is 60 kilometers per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.