Colossal storm seen on Saturn

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

*Signs In The Sun, The Moon and The Stars

Colossal storm seen on Saturn*

By Will Dunham in Washington

November 10, 2006 10:00am
Article from: Reuters

A COLOSSAL, swirling storm with a well-developed eye is churning at
Saturn's south pole, the first time a truly hurricane-like storm has
been detected on a planet other than Earth.

NASA images showed the storm on the giant, ringed planet was about
8000km wide, measuring roughly two thirds the diameter of Earth, with
winds howling clockwise at 550km/h.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which swirls counterclockwise, is far bigger,
but is less like a hurricane because it lacks the typical eye and eye wall.

The images - essentially a 14-frame movie - were captured over a period
of three hours on October 11 by the US space agency's Cassini spacecraft
as it passed about 340,000 km from the planet as part of its exploration
of Saturn and its moons.

Michael Flasar, an astrophysicist involved in the mission at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the storm
looked like water swirling down the drain in a bath, only on a gigantic
scale.

"We've never seen anything like this before," Mr Flasar said.

"It's a spectacular-looking storm."

Saturn, the second-biggest planet in the solar system with an equatorial
diameter of 119,000 km and the sixth from the sun, is about 1.2 billion
km from Earth.

Its south pole storm si much bigger than Earth hurricanes. It has a
well-developed eye ringed by towering clouds that soar 30-75 km above
those in the dark centre, two to five times higher than clouds in our
thunderstorms and hurricanes.

A distinguishing feature of hurricanes on Earth are the eye-wall clouds
that form when moist air flows inward across an ocean surface, rising
vertically and releasing a heavy rain around a circular region of
descending air that represents the eye. Scientists said it was unclear
whether Saturn's storm was a water-driven system.

It differed from Earth hurricanes in part because it remained stuck at
the pole rather than drifting as such storms did on this planet and
because it did not form over a liquid water ocean, with Saturn being a
gaseous planet, NASA said.

"It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane,"
Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said.

"Whatever it is, we're going to focus on the eye of this storm and find
out why it's there."

Mr Flasar said scientists had more work ahead to understand the Saturn
storm.

"I'm hoping that as we puzzle over it, it will become even more exciting
as we start to connect the dots in our brains. But right now, the wheels
are a little creaky," Mr Flasar said.

"We're all arguing with each other about what it might or might not be."