Peering into the Storm... Saturn is a gas giant planet with a tremendously thick gaseous atmosphere, tens of thousands of kilometers deep (Earth’s is ~100 km thick, for comparison) This image from NASAs Cassini mission was taken on Nov. 27, 2012, with Cassinis narrow-angle camera. The camera was pointing toward Saturns north pole from approximately 224,618 miles (361,488 kilometers) away. Saturn rotates once every 10.5 hours, so its day is less than half the length of ours on Earth. When you take all that gas and spin it that rapidly, you get amazing structures in the clouds. Here, the image shows stunning detail in Saturn’s atmosphere. Clouds rise and sink and get stretched out, forming long valleys and ridges, streamers circling the planet’s pole. This vortex, as it’s called, is huge: over 2000 kilometers (1200 miles) across, if I’ve determined the scale of this picture correctly. That’s far bigger than a fully mature hurricane on Earth, but unlike a terrestrial cyclone, this may be a permanent feature in Saturn’s atmosphere... Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 00:20:23 +0000
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