The Cassini Imaging Team at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado just posted this amazing photo of a boiling storm on Saturn.

The bright whorls and small-scale specks of convective clouds drift through a region just north of Saturn’s bright equatorial band. Observers have seen major storms develop in this region in the past 15-20 years.

The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 13, 2006, at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 15 kilometers (9 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.

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

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: April 24, 2006 (PIA 08162)