For the first time ever, NASA's Cassini spacecraft recorded a gargantuan hurricane churning around Saturn's north pole on the visible-light spectrum. The hurricane stems from an enigmatic six-sided weather phenomenon known as "the hexagon."
"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," Andrew Ingersoll, Cassini team member from the California Institute of Technology, said. "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."
The hurricane's eye itself measures a whopping 1,250 miles across, which is around 20 times the size of the average hurricane on Earth, according to NASA. Despite the fact that winds near the edge of the hurricane clock in at 330 miles per hour, scientists are hoping to use the data sent back from Cassini to better understand hurricanes and weather patterns here on Earth.
The Saturn hurricane is unique in the sense that it is pretty much locked in on the planet's north pole region, and isn't moving. This is in stark contrast to Earth hurricanes, which usually drift towards the north.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn back in 2004, and detected a huge vortex around the planet's north pole. Saturn, however, was in the middle of its north polar winter, and it wasn't until the passing of the equinox in August 2009 that Cassini was able to capture the hurricane in the visible-light spectrum.
"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."