NASA's Cassini Obtains Images of Bizarre Hexagonal Storm System Around Saturn

NASA has released the first high resolution movie of an exclusive six-sided jet stream around Saturn's North Pole that was obtained by Cassini spacecraft.

NASA's Cassini mission has produced several images of  Saturn's bizarre hexagonal storm system  and this is the first movie of its kind that used color filters to provide a complete view of the top of the Saturn down to nearly 70 degree latitude.

The unique geometric feature fixed at the north pole of Saturn is called the hexagon and is a wavy jet of stream spread 30,000 kms  across with winds of  200 miles per hour and an enormous rotating storm at the center.

"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."

A similar sort of six sided storm hexagon circling the North Pole was spotted in the year 2007 by Cassini. It was initially imaged by Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts.

On Earth, friction from landforms or ice caps distorts the weather patterns. Looking at the stability of the hexagon, scientists assume that the absence of solid landforms on Saturn may contribute to the stability. The recent images captured by Cassini over a 10-hour time span allowed the researchers to take a sneak peak at the motion of the cloud structures. They noticed the storm circling the pole as well as a few whirlpools moving in the opposite direction of the hexagon, and a few entered the path of the jet streams. The largest of these vortices covers 2,200 miles,  twice the size of the biggest hurricane ever recorded on Earth.

Researchers examined the images in false color, which helps differentiate between the particles that are suspended in the atmosphere surrounding the hexagon as well as inside the hexagon.

"Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true," said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia. "The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth's Antarctic ozone hole." 

"As we approach Saturn's summer solstice in 2017, lighting conditions over its north pole will improve, and we are excited to track the changes that occur both inside and outside the hexagon boundary," concluded Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.