These kinds of data help scientists compare weather patterns around our solar system and learn what sustains and extinguishes them."
#Thunder and lightning is a quiet storm movie
"We had front-row seats to a wonderful adventure movie and got to watch the whole plot from start to finish.
"Cassini's stay in the Saturn system has enabled us to marvel at the power of this storm," said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Jupiter's storms also have a quiet center, unlike the violence at the center of Saturn's storms. But Oval BA and Jupiter's more famous storm - the Great Red Spot - are not thunder-and-lightning storms. The vortex grew to be as large as the giant storm known as Oval BA on Jupiter. And it also created the largest vortex ever observed in the troposphere of Saturn, expanding up to 7,500 miles across." The storm head itself thrashed for 201 days, and its updraft erupted with an intensity that would have sucked out the entire volume of Earth's atmosphere in 150 days. "The storm maintained its intensity for an unusually long time. "This thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn was a beast," said Kunio Sayanagi, the paper's lead author and a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia. While Cassini's infrared detectors continue to track some lingering effects in higher layers of Saturn's atmosphere, the troposphere - which is the weather-producing layer, lower in the atmosphere - has been quiet at that latitude. 28, after 267 days, the Saturn storm stopped thundering for good. Why the encounter would shut down the storm is still a mystery.īy Aug. It was only when the head of the storm ran into the vortex in June 2011 that the massive, convective storm faded away. The bright, turbulent storm head was able to chomp all the way around the planet. But Saturn has no land to stop its hurricanes. Terrestrial storms have never run into their own wakes - they encounter topographic features like mountains first and expend themselves. Within months, the storm wrapped around the planet at that latitude, stretching about 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) in circumference, thundering and throwing lightning along the way.
Shortly after the bright, turbulent head of the storm emerged and started moving west, it spawned a clockwise-spinning vortex that drifted much more slowly. 5, 2010, and tracked by Cassini's radio and plasma wave subsystem and imaging cameras, erupted around 33 degrees north latitude. This storm in Saturn's northern hemisphere also feasted off warm "air" in the gas giant's atmosphere. "Even the giant storms at Jupiter don't consume themselves like this, which goes to show that nature can play many awe-inspiring variations on a theme and surprise us again and again."Įarth's hurricanes feed off the energy of warm water and leave a cold-water wake. "This Saturn storm behaved like a terrestrial hurricane - but with a twist unique to Saturn," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, who is a co-author on the new paper in the journal Icarus. It is the first time scientists have observed a storm consume itself in this way anywhere in the solar system. In a new paper that provides the most detail yet about the life and death of a monstrous thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn, scientists from NASA's Cassini mission describe how the massive storm churned around the planet until it encountered its own tail and sputtered out.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton UniversityĬall it a Saturnian version of the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent that bites its own tail. This three-frame animation from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the swirling clouds in a vortex spawned by a great northern storm on Saturn. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University This image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveals the wind patterns within a large vortex that was spawned by a giant northern storm on Saturn. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton UniversityĪ vortex that was part of a giant storm on Saturn slowly dissipates over time in this set of false color images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This mosaic of false-color images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows what a giant storm in Saturn's northern hemisphere looked like about a month after it began. This set of images from NASA's Cassini mission shows the evolution of a massive thunder-and-lightning storm that circled all the way around Saturn and fizzled when it ran into its own tail.