WASHINGTON, April 30 (RIA Novosti) – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has sent back the first close-up views of a massive hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north pole, with an eye measuring nearly half the width of the United States and winds of around 330 miles per hour (531 kilometers per hour) at the outer edge of the storm.
Unlike storms on Earth, which move, the hurricane on Saturn is immobile and scientists think it has been churning around the north pole for several years, only becoming visible to Cassini as Saturn’s northern hemisphere begins to see sunlight for the first time since Cassini arrived in 2004, seven years after it launched.
Using high-resolution images sent back by Cassini from Saturn, scientists have measured the eye of the hurricane at 1,250 miles (2,012 kilometers) across – 20 times larger than the eye of the average hurricane on Earth.
The polar storm on Saturn has many similarities to terrestrial hurricanes, including a cloudless eye and high clouds forming a “wall” around the eye, making it look strikingly similar to Earth-bound storms.
“We did a double-take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” Andrew Ingersoll, a member of the team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena that enhances and analyzes the images sent back by Cassini, said, adding that the storm “is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”
Scientists hope to learn how storms on Saturn use water vapor, in order to find out more about how hurricanes on Earth, which gain their strength from warm ocean water, are generated and sustained.
