About ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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Space in Member States
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
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Science & Exploration
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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Enabling & Support
Making space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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Vortex and Rings
The Cassini spacecraft captures three magnificent sights at once: Saturn's north polar vortex and hexagon along with its expansive rings.
The hexagon, which is wider than two Earths, owes its appearance to the jet stream that forms its perimeter. The jet stream forms a six-lobed, stationary wave which wraps around the north polar regions at a latitude of roughly 77 degrees North.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 37 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on 2 April 2014 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 43 degrees. Image scale is 131 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.
