20 September 2010
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
NASA recently published an amazing close-up image of Saturn. The image shows a beautiful swirling cloud pattern, in Saturn's turbulent wonderful atmosphere.
The image was obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera, on 18 July 2010, through an infrared filter. Cassini was approximately 2.4 million km from Saturn.
Saturn’s atmosphere consists mostly of hydrogen (96.3%) and helium (2.4%), with trace amounts of ammonia, methane, ethane and other compounds. Like Jupiter, the largest planet, Saturn is totally enveloped by colorful bands of thick cloud layers. Occasionally Saturn features white large oval clouds. They are stormy phenomena that seem to occur around the beginning of Saturn’s northern summer. Wind speeds in Saturn reach up to 400 m/s.
References
NASA’s Photojournal
NASA’s Saturn Fact Sheet
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/saturnfact.html
Wikipedia
Further Reading
Cassini Mission Homepage
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist