NASA - NASA Probe Gets Close-Up Views of Large Hurricane on Saturn

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NASA Probe Gets Close Views of Large Saturn Hurricane

Narrated video about a hurricane-like storm seen at Saturn's north pole by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
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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. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
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The north pole of Saturn, in the fresh light of spring, is revealed in this color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
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This spectacular, vertigo inducing, false-color image from NASA's Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn's north pole. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
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PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn's north pole.

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. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph(150 meters per second). The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon.

"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. "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."

Scientists will be studying the hurricane to gain insight into hurricanes on Earth, which feed off warm ocean water. 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.

Both a terrestrial hurricane and Saturn's north polar vortex have a central eye with no clouds or very low clouds. 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.

A major difference between the hurricanes is that the one on Saturn is much bigger than its counterparts on Earth and spins surprisingly fast. At Saturn, the wind in the eye wall blows more than four times faster than hurricane-force winds on Earth. Unlike terrestrial hurricanes, which tend to move, the Saturnian hurricane is locked onto the planet's north pole. On Earth, hurricanes tend to drift northward because of the forces acting on the fast swirls of wind as the planet rotates. The one on Saturn does not drift and is already as far north as it can be.

"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.

Scientists believe the massive storm has been churning for years. 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. 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. Only then did sunlight begin flooding Saturn's northern hemisphere. The view required a change in the angle of Cassini's orbits around Saturn so the spacecraft could see the poles.

"Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn's equatorial plane," said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "You cannot see the polar regions very well from an equatorial orbit. Observing the planet from different vantage points reveals more about the cloud layers that cover the entirety of the planet."

Cassini changes its orbital inclination for such an observing campaign only once every few years. Because the spacecraft uses flybys of Saturn's moon Titan to change the angle of its orbit, the inclined trajectories require attentive oversight from navigators. The path requires careful planning years in advance and sticking very precisely to the planned itinerary to ensure enough propellant is available for the spacecraft to reach future planned orbits and encounters.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about Cassini and its mission,

visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

 and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

Mysterious Hurricane at Saturn's North Pole

04.29.13

 

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Music.
Andy Ingersoll: Hi, I'm Andy Ingersoll, a member of the Cassini imaging team.
Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn for 9 years and we've been following this hexagon which surrounds the north pole.
It's bigger than 2 Earths, and it's a wandering jet stream.
But it's been winter in the north. So we have not been able to see what's at the center of the hexagon.
But now it's spring. And what we've found at the center of the hexagon is a Saturn hurricane.
This is a view from directly over the north pole, which is made possible by the orbit of the spacecraft which is now taking us over the pole.
The winds are flowing at 300 miles an hour, which is 4 times hurricane force.
The fluffy white clouds in the center are about the size of Texas.
We can use special filters to measure the heights of the clouds.
The red are low clouds and the green are high clouds.
We call it a Saturn hurricane because it has the eye, it has the high winds, but it's different from an Earth hurricane because it's locked to the north pole.
And unlike a terrestrial hurricane there's no ocean underneath.
And that's one of the puzzles we're trying to figure out.
Music.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology 

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