Cassini Video Captures Giant Hurricane on Saturn’s North Pole

While Jupiter has always been known for its massive ‘red spot’, which is actually an enormous swirling hurricane like storm on the largest planet in our solar system, new images and video from the Cassini spacecraft have also found a huge hurricane on Saturn.

These new images and video from Cassini have given NASA scientists their first close-up, visible-light views of the hurricane. Located over Saturn’s north pole, the hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles wide. According to NASA, this is about 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Winds in the outer edge of the hurricane are estimated to be traveling at 330 mph.

Watch Video of the Hurricane on Saturn below (credit NASA)

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

Unlike hurricanes here on Earth, which move across the planet, the Saturnian hurricane appears to be stationary over the pole. Scientists believe that this is because the storm has reached the pole where the planet’s rotation and other winds can no longer cause any drift. “The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that’s likely why it’s stuck at the pole,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va.

Like Jupiter’s red spot, Cassini mission scientists believe the massive storm on Saturn has also been churning for years. Cassini has not been able to see the storm until now because, since Cassini’s arrival at the ringed planet in 2004, the pole was dark in Saturn’s long winter in the north until August 2009.

“Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn’s equatorial plane,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “You cannot see the polar regions very well from an equatorial orbit. Observing the planet from different vantage points reveals more about the cloud layers that cover the entirety of the planet.”