HUGE HURRICANE RAGES ON SATURN

[Anonymous]

Huge ‘hurricane’ rages on Saturn
A
hurricane-like storm, two-thirds the diameter of Earth, is raging at
Saturn’s south pole, new images from Nasa’s Cassini space probe
reveal.Measuring 5,000 miles (8,000km) across, the storm is the first
hurricane ever detected on a planet other than Earth.Scientists say the
storm has the eye and eye-wall clouds characteristic of a hurricane and
its winds are swirling clockwise at 350mph (550km/h).However, unlike
Earth hurricanes it seems stuck at the pole, not drifting.”It looks
like a hurricane, but it doesn’t behave like a hurricane,” Dr Andrew
Ingersoll, a member of Cassini’s imaging team at the California
Institute of Technology said. “Whatever it is, we’re going to focus on
the eye of this storm and find out why it’s there.”Though Jupiter’s
Great Red Spot storm moves anti-clockwise, and is far bigger than the
storm on Saturn, it does not have the eye and eye-wall that mark out a
hurricane.
We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s a spectacular-looking storm,Michael Flasar, Nasa astrophysicist
An
Earth hurricane’s eye and eye-walls form when warm, moist air flows
inwards across an ocean’s surface and rapidly rises vertically,
dropping heavy rain in a circular band around descending air in the
eye.But Saturn is a gaseous planet therefore this storm does not have
an ocean at its base.The Saturn storm is bigger not only in diameter
than an Earth hurricane, but in height too, with a ring of huge clouds
towering 20-45 miles (30-70km) above the well-developed eye – two to
five times higher than in storms on Earth.

Unknown phenomenon
One
Nasa scientist, Michael Flasar, told Reuters news agency that the storm
looked just like water swirling down a bath plug hole, only on a
colossal scale. “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Mr Flasar
said. “It’s a spectacular-looking storm.”Fourteen frames of the storm
were captured by the Cassini spacecraft over the course of three hours
on 11 October 2006.Cassini was passing about 210,000 miles (340,000km)
from the ringed planet as it continues its exploration of Saturn and
its moons.Cassini entered into orbit around Saturn on 1 July 2004.
Later that year, it released the piggybacked Huygens probe towards the
planet’s largest moon, Titan.Huygens touched down on Titan on 14
January 2005, sending back data on the moon’s atmosphere, weather and
its surface.The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of
the US space agency (Nasa), the European Space Agency (Esa) and the
Italian Space Agency (Asi).

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November 13, 2006 at 11:31 AM