http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061109/sc_nm/space_saturn_dc_1
Colossal hurricane-like storm seen on Saturn
By Will Dunham Thu Nov 9, 5:32 PM ET
WASHINGTON (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 on Thursday.
The storm on the giant, ringed planet is about 5,000 miles wide, measuring
roughly two thirds the diameter of Earth, with winds howling clockwise at 350
mph (550 kph).
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 U.S. space agency's Cassini spacecraft as it
passed about 210,000 miles
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 Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the storm looks just like
water swirling down the drain in a bath tub, only on a gigantic scale.
"We've never seen anything like this before," Flasar said in an interview.
"It's a spectacular-looking storm."
Saturn, the second-biggest planet in the solar system with an equatorial
diameter of 74,000 miles and the sixth from the sun, is about 746 million miles
from Earth.
Its south pole storm is much bigger than Earth hurricanes. It has a
well-developed eye ringed by towering clouds that soar 20-45 miles above those
in the dark center, two to five times higher than clouds in our thunderstorms
and hurricanes, NASA said.
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 differs from Earth hurricanes in part because it remains stuck at the pole
rather than drifting as such storms do 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 in a statement. "Whatever it is, we're going to
focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it's there."
Flasar said scientists have 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," Flasar said. "We're all arguing with each other about what it might or
might not be."
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