Oct. 14, 2008 -- Two years ago, scientists using the Cassini spacecraft discovered a massive cyclone spinning over Saturn's south pole. This week they have announced the stunning discovery of a twin storm swirling over the planet's presumably stable north pole.
"In a lot of ways, these are the most powerful cyclones ever seen," said Kevin Baines, a Cassini scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They would expand over the whole planet if it was the Earth."
Both storms are whipping up winds at speeds of 325 mph -- more than twice as fast as cyclones on Earth -- and have well-defined rings of clouds similar to a hurricane's eye. Air inside the ring is warm, like terrestrial storms, but on Saturn the rings are locked on the poles.
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"There's some bizarre physics going on, on Saturn," Baines said. "It's drawing large amounts of energy from inside Saturn to power these storms."
"We've always thought of Saturn being this serene body up there," he added. "It's very lovely -- a few storms on it, but it looks like a pearl in the sky with vivid hues to it due to the different types of clouds, but nothing very dramatic. What we're seeing is if you go through those hazes and get down to the depths of Saturn, you find a roiling atmosphere with all sorts of dynamic features."
Previous images of Saturn's south pole showed an outer ring of high clouds surrounding a region of mostly clear air, with a few puffy clouds circulating in the center. New findings released by NASA this week, however, show the puffy clouds are turbulent convective storms, with an eyewall all their own.
"It's intriguing," said Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Convection is an important part of the planet's energy budget because the warm upwelling air carries heat from the interior."
Last year, scientists had found a hexagon-shaped cloud structure over the north pole that was believed to be stable.
Infrared imagery taken by Cassini, however, shows clouds inside the hexagon whipping around at more than 300 mph and encircling another killer cyclone. Oddly, neither the fast-moving clouds inside the hexagon nor the newly discovered cyclone seem to disrupt the six-sided hexagon, scientists said.
"There's very unusual, very dramatic, very dynamic things going on here," Baines said.
Scientists plan to keep watch on the storms to see how the features evolve as the seasons change. Saturn's southern fall equinox occurs in August 2009.
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