One of my favorite planets in our Solar System, (likely the favorite outside of good ol’ Earth), is the ringed planet, Saturn.
Well folks, Saturn has thrown the folks over at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory a curve ball. The Cassini spacecraft photographed a huge storm swirling with 350-mph winds (!) at the ringed planet’s south pole. This storm looks for all the Universe like an Earthly hurricane. Two major differences pop up immediately:
- The storm is stationary. It sits squarely on Saturn’s South Pole and doesn’t move, and…
- The storm is some 5,000 miles across! That is two thirds the size of Earth!
The eye of this storm is extremely well formed and scientist are able to see many times farther into the atmosphere of this gas giant than ever before. Some 45 miles down.
“The clear skies over the eye appear to extend down to a level about twice as deep as the usual cloud level observed on Saturn,” said Kevin Baines of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This gives us the deepest view yet into Saturn over a wide range of wavelengths, and reveals a mysterious set of dark clouds at the bottom of the eye.”
“The winds decrease with height, and the atmosphere is sinking, compressing and heating over the south pole,” said Richard Achterberg, a member of Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer team at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Previous observations have shown that Saturn’s south pole is warmer, by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit, than other parts of the planet.
I look forward to seeing what comes of this storm.
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On another front, scientist at Duke University report that they have developed a practical method of making objects ‘invisible’ to microwave energy. Completely invisible. While this science is in its infancy, the future looks bright clear.
At this rate we’ll beat the Romulans to the punch on the galaxy’s first practical ‘cloaking device’!
Bull, out.
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