Summer is slowly coming to Saturn’s northern hemisphere. The north pole, which was in the midst of a seven-year-long winter when Cassini arrived in 2004, is now seen basking in the sunlight of mid-spring. Cassini is taking full advantage of the sunlight to capture these amazing views of the north polar hexagon and myriad storms, large and small, that comprise the weather systems in the polar region.
This view is centered on terrain at 75 degrees north latitude, 322 degrees west longitude. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 26, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 383,000 miles (616,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 48 degrees. Image scale is 21 miles (33 kilometers) 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 . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute