The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, working along with the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency sent a spacecraft called the Cassini-Huygens mission to capture images of the ringed planet Saturn. One picture, taken 1 point 3 million miles away from Saturn with a scale of 75 miles per pixel shows the effects of the notoriously strong winds that blow on the gas giant.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, working along with the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency undertook the Cassini-Huygens mission to capture images of the ringed planet Saturn.
One picture, taken 1 point 3 million miles away from Saturn with a scale of 75 miles per pixel shows the effects of the notoriously strong winds that blow on the gas giant.
According to NASA’s website, the strongest winds occur at the equator of Saturn and can sometimes exceed one thousand miles per hour, compared to the strongest winds on Earth, which have reportedly reached up to 246 miles an hour.
Showing the sunny side of Saturn, the image was taken on December 27th of 2013, from about 51 degrees above the ring plane using a spectral filter that captures certain wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The picture shows the bands and different zones that are caused by the high speed winds, including the hexagon visible at the north pole, which was first discovered by NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 back in 1980 and ’81.
The Voyager photos showed the clouds moving in an enclosed jet stream inside the hexagon dragged by winds measuring around 250 miles per hour.
