Contact: Preston Dyches
preston@ciclops.org
720-974-5859
Space Science Institute

Wind World

Caption: Far above the howling winds of Saturn, its icy moons circle the planet in silence. Mimas (397 kilometers, 247 miles across) is seen near upper right, while Tethys (1,071 kilometers, 665 miles across) hovers at bottom. Dark shadows cast by the see-through rings slice across the northern hemisphere.

The dark doughnut-shaped storm near the south pole is at least 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) across and could easily swallow any of Saturn’s moons, aside from giant Titan (5,150 kilometers, 3,200 miles across).

The image was taken with the wide angle camera on June 21, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers from a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 53 degrees. The image scale is 125 kilometers (78 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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team & NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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