Cassini Image: High Winds Aloft on Saturn

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05384

PIA05384: High Winds Aloft on Saturn

Target Name: Saturn
Is a satellite of: Sol (our sun)
Mission: Cassini
Spacecraft: Cassini Orbiter
Instrument: Imaging Science Subsystem - Narrow Angle
Product Size: 512 samples x 512 lines
Produced By: CICLOPS/Space Science Institute
Primary Data Set: Cassini

Original Caption Released with Image:

Wind-blown clouds and haze high in Saturn's atmosphere are captured in
a movie made from images taken by the Cassini narrow angle camera
between Feb. 15 and Feb. 19, 2004.

The bright areas in these images represent high haze and clouds near
the top of Saturn's troposphere. Cassini has three filters designed to
sense different heights of clouds and haze in the planet's atmosphere.
Any light detected by cameras using the 889-nanometer filter is
reflected very high in the atmosphere, before the light is absorbed.

This is the first movie ever made showing Saturn in these near-infrared
wavelengths. The images were made using a filter sensitive to a narrow
range of wavelengths centered at 889-nanometers, where methane in
Saturn's atmosphere absorbs sunlight.

In the movie, atmospheric motions can be seen most clearly in the
equatorial region and at other southern latitudes. Saturn's equatorial
region seems disturbed in the same way that it has been for the past
decade, as revealed by observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
Researchers have speculated that the bright cloud patterns there are
associated with water-moist convection arising from a deeper
atmospheric level where water condenses on Saturn, and rising to levels
at or above the visible cloud tops. Close analysis of future data by
scientists on the Cassini-Huygens mission should help determine whether
this is the case.

Saturn's rings are extremely overexposed in these images. Because the
range of wavelengths for this spectral filter is narrow, and because
most of this light is absorbed by Saturn, the disc of Saturn is
inherently faint and the exposures required are quite long (22
seconds). The rings do not strongly absorb at these wavelengths, so
they reflect more light and are overexposed compared to the atmosphere.
Orbiting moons in the images were manually removed during processing.
The movie, consisting of 30 stacked images, spans five days and
captures five complete but non-consecutive Saturn rotations. The
direction of motion is from left to right. Each 10.6-hour Saturn
rotation is evenly sampled by six images. After each rotation sequence,
the planet can be seen to grow slightly in the field of view. Cassini
was 65.6 million kilometers (40.7 million miles) from Saturn when the
images, reduced in scale by a factor of two onboard the spacecraft,
were taken. The resulting image scale is approximately 786 kilometers
(420 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 Office of
Space Science, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space
Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image Note:
Meth44DAnim

Ron wrote:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05384

The Cassini is a very exciting mission!

A nit: The almost 9 meg animation is 5 times as large as it needs to be.
Why didn't they crop the black parts around the edges?



--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

On a sunny day (Fri, 26 Mar 2004 14:42:56 -0700) it happened Hop David
wrote in
:



Ron wrote:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05384

The Cassini is a very exciting mission!

A nit: The almost 9 meg animation is 5 times as large as it needs to be.
Why didn't they crop the black parts around the edges?
It's a pilot
In the future there will be only animations.
This saves cost, and makes it for example possible to go FTL and
visit alien planets with wild life forms.

Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Jan Panteltje wrote:

It's a pilot
In the future there will be only animations.
This saves cost, and makes it for example possible to go FTL and
visit alien planets with wild life forms.


?


--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html