Churning atmosphere on Saturn
Copyright: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University
Like a swirl from a paintbrush being dipped in water, this image from
the Cassini orbiter shows the progress of a massive storm on Saturn.
The storm first developed in December 2010, and this mosaic captures how
it appeared on 6 March 2011.
The head of the storm is towards the
left of the image, where the most turbulent activity is shown in white,
but towards the centre you can also see the trace of a spinning vortex
in the wake of the storm.
This image, centred at about 0º
longitude and 35º N latitude, has had its colours enhanced to help
reveal the complex processes in Saturn’s weather. The white corresponds
to the highest cloud tops, but to the human eye the storm would appear
more as a bright area against a yellow background.
Cassini also monitored the temperature of the storm, showing a rapid spike as energy was released into the atmosphere.
The
storm grew so large that on Earth it would easily cover all of Europe.
Atmospheric disturbances of this size can be expected once during each
of Saturn’s orbits around the Sun, which takes 30 Earth years. However,
this particular event surprised scientists by occurring during the
northern hemisphere spring, rather than the more typically stormy
Saturnian summer.
The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative
project of NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate,
Washington, DC.
Source: ESA - Space in Images
