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These two natural color views taken 11 hours -- one Saturn day -- apart by NASA's Cassini spacecraft help scientists measure wind speeds in the huge storm seen here in the planet's northern hemisphere.
The view on the left is earlier than the view on the right. Scientists use these time-lapse images to track specific, small, and sometimes subtle features in the clouds. The smallest features visible in the image are the most useful. However, tracking the clouds in this storm is difficult because the features don't always last one Saturn day.
See PIA14903 and PIA14905 to learn more about the size and development of this storm.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create these natural color views.
The images for the view on the left were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 23, 2011 at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Saturn. The images for the view on the right were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 24, 2011 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) from Saturn.
Image scale is 64 miles (104 kilometers) per pixel in both views.
The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. 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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. 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.