NASA’s false-color image of Saturn’s north pole hurricane looks similar to a rose. In this image, red correlates to low clouds while green indicates high clouds.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)
NASA released the most detailed images ever seen of a gigantic hurricane that scientists believe has existed at Saturn’s north pole for years.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft snapped the spectacular pictures this past November from a vantage point approximately 261,000 miles from Saturn — a distance so extreme that the above picture has an image scale of about 1 mile per pixel.
Putting the puny weather systems here on Earth to shame, this super-size storm stretches about 1,250 miles wide and creates calamitous wind speeds of up to 330 mph. A hexagon-shaped cloud pattern, measuring 15,000 miles across (roughly the size of four Earths), surrounds the hurricane, which you can see in the photo below.
“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. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”
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