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 2,000 kilometres wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth.
Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are travelling 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 vapour in Saturn's hydrogen atmosphere," said Ingersoll. Scientists will be studying the hurricane to gain insight into hurricanes on Earth, which feed off warm ocean water.
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