NASA spacecraft spies massive hurricane at Saturn’s north pole

If you got out over the weekend to see the best views of Saturn we've had in nearly 6 years, did you manage to get a look at the strange hexagon of clouds at the planet's north pole? How about the giant hurricane that's swirling at the middle of the hexagon, which NASA scientists found to be around 20 times the size of a hurricane here on Earth?

Well, if you didn't see it, or you didn't have a telescope powerful enough to resolve that much detail, NASA has you covered.

[ More Geekquinox: Virgin Galactic spaceplane makes first powered flight ]

They managed to capture this excellent view of this storm with their Cassini spacecraft, which has been investigating Saturn and its moons since 2004. For a sense of scale, the hexagon of clouds is around twice the diameter of the Earth.

It was Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 that first saw the hexagon at Saturn's north pole, back in the early 1980s, but that was as the northern hemisphere of the planet was going into winter. Without the light from the Sun on the north pole to light it up for us, there wasn't a good way to get more pictures of the feature until just recently, when spring began.

This false-colour image shows the spectacular details of the clouds:

The eye of the storm alone is roughly 2,000 kilometres across, which is roughly 20 times largest than the typical hurricane eye here on Earth. Wind speeds just at the outer edge of the storm are around 540 km/h, which is more than four times stronger than what we term 'hurricane-force winds', and more than twice as strong as the most powerful category 5 hurricane winds.

The storm's size isn't the only remarkable feature about it. The Voyager probes saw the hexagon back in 1980 and 1981, and it's still there now. Presumably, the storm has been there for all this time as well, and it's highly unlikely that these features just started up when the probes happened to be passing by. So, like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, these could be perpetual features in Saturn's atmosphere. Unlike Jupiter's storm, though, Saturn's doesn't travel around close to the equator. Instead, it's locked around the north pole.

[ More Geekqinox: Small meteoroid causes ‘bullet hole’ in ISS solar panel ]

"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 CalTech in Pasadena, according to a NASA statement. "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."

NASA scientists will continue to investigate the hurricane, so they can find out how it's sustaining itself just on water vapour. What they find out could lead to great improvements in hurricane forecasting here on Earth.

(Images and video courtesy: NASA)

Geek out with the latest in science and weather.
Follow @ygeekquinox on Twitter!