Only then did sunlight begin flooding Saturn's northern hemisphere. During that time, the Cassini spacecraft's composite infrared spectrometer and visual and infrared mapping spectrometer detected a great vortex, but a visible-light view had to wait for the passing of the equinox in August 2009. When Cassini arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, Saturn's north pole was dark because the planet was in the middle of its north polar winter. Scientists believe the massive storm has been churning for years. "The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that's likely why it's stuck at the pole," said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va. The one on Saturn does not drift and is already as far north as it can be. On Earth, hurricanes tend to drift northward because of the forces acting on the fast swirls of wind as the planet rotates. Unlike terrestrial hurricanes, which tend to move, the Saturnian hurricane is locked onto the planet's north pole. At Saturn, the wind in the eye wall blows more than four times faster than hurricane-force winds on Earth. Other similar features include high clouds forming an eye wall, other high clouds spiraling around the eye, and a counter-clockwise spin in the northern hemisphere.Ī major difference between the hurricanes is that the one on Saturn is much bigger than its counterparts on Earth and spins surprisingly fast.
Although there is no body of water close to these clouds high in Saturn's atmosphere, learning how these Saturnian storms use water vapor could tell scientists more about how terrestrial hurricanes are generated and sustained.īoth a terrestrial hurricane and Saturn's north polar vortex have a central eye with no clouds or very low clouds. Scientists will be studying the hurricane to gain insight into hurricanes on Earth, which feed off warm ocean water. "But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn's hydrogen atmosphere." "We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph(150 meters per second).
In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane's eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn's north pole. This spectacular, vertigo inducing, false-color image from NASA's Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn's north pole.
The north pole of Saturn, in the fresh light of spring, is revealed in this color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The spinning vortex of Saturn's north polar storm resembles a deep red rose of giant proportions surrounded by green foliage in this false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Narrated video about a hurricane-like storm seen at Saturn's north pole by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
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