New imagery from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn shows more of its beautiful and sometimes bizarre features: NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft Obtains Best Views of Saturn Hexagon – NASA
of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn’s north pole known as “the hexagon.”
Full image and caption
the curious six-sided jet stream at Saturn’s north pole known as “the hexagon.”
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn’s north pole.
This is the first hexagon movie of its kind, using color filters, and the first to show a complete view of the top of Saturn down to about 70 degrees latitude. Spanning about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200-mile-per-hour winds (about 322 kilometers per hour) with a massive, rotating storm at the center. There is no weather feature exactly, consistently like this anywhere else in the solar system.
“The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades — and who knows — maybe centuries.”
Weather patterns on Earth are interrupted when they encounter friction from landforms or ice caps. Scientists suspect the stability of the hexagon has something to do with the lack of solid landforms on Saturn, which is essentially a giant ball of gas.
Here’s a NASA JPL Google Hangout in which several planetary scientists discuss the latest images and findings from Cassini:
Update: A PBS News Hour interview with Carolyn Porco, a leader of the Cassini imaging group, about the mission and the latest results: