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Cassini’s latest view of Saturn shows deceptive tranquility

The latest images of Saturn from the Cassini mission show a deceptively tranquil planet that belies the turbulent world beneath.

As NASA writes:

Its atmosphere is a fast-moving and turbulent place with wind speeds in excess of 1,100 miles per hour (1,800 km per hour) in places. The lack of a solid surface to create drag means that there are fewer features to slow down the wind than on a planet like Earth.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft from a distance of around 2.5 million kilometres with a wide-angle camera on 4 February 2015 using a spectral filter centered at 752 nanometers, in the near-infrared portion of the spectrum.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

 

Bill Condie

Bill Condie

Bill Condie is a science journalist based in Adelaide, Australia.

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