Huge Storm on Saturn Chronicled

Cassini records Saturn mega-storm, and incredible burp, for history

To put it in perspective, NASA told the Los Angeles Times, the storm was similar to what would be a violent storm large enough to cover all of North America and continue onward around the planet-for nine months.

"It's a very exciting thing. a once-in-a-lifetime thing," Brigette Hesman, a scientist at University of Maryland and the Goddard Spaceflight Center who studies storms on Saturn, told the Times of the storm she referred to as "the burp." "The reason we call it the burp is, essentially, the storm erupted from below and all this energy moved into the stratosphere," she said. Hesman was the lead author on a team that studied the storm and will have their findings published in the Nov. 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. "To get a temperature change of the same scale on Earth, you'd be going from the depths of winter in Fairbanks, Alaska, to the height of summer in the Mojave Desert," she added in her report. This storm,which released tons of energy into Saturn's atmosphere, was one of the planet's Great White Spots, which appear roughly every 30 Earth years. This particular storm surrounded the planet by late January 2011, and reached out as far as 9,000 miles before scientists saw the storm ebbing in late June 2011.

According to NASA, the ethylene gas--which NASA is calling a "burp"--that was generated by the storm was 100 times more than scientists thought the planet was capable of making. "The temperature spike is so extreme it's almost unbelievable, especially in this part of Saturn's atmosphere, which is typically very stable," Brigette Hesman, a University of Maryland scientist who works at NASA, said in a statement.
A titanic storm wracking the atmosphere of Saturn, ringed giant planet of the outer Solar System, resulted in an "unprecedented belch of energy" and an associated super-enormous emission of ethylene gas "the origin of which is a mystery", according to NASA boffins. "This temperature spike is so extreme it's almost unbelievable, especially in this part of Saturn's atmosphere, which typically is very stable," explains Brigette Hesman, top NASA brainbox.

Saturn normally has large storms occur once a year which equates to about every thirty years in Earth `s time. Scientists cannot really pinpoint why this type of storm happened on Saturn because storms in space are different from storms occurring on Earth. Scientists are analyzing data that reveal red flags such as the surge in extreme temperature and the detection of Ethylene gas not normally found on Saturn. Scientists hope to gain new knowledge from the study of this phenemenon by piecing the complete science puzzle together, forming their hypothesis. This is what makes science so interesting and fun. This storm also marks a milestone in NASA history because it was the first storm of its kind to be studied by a spacecraft that was orbiting in and around the planet. It was the first of its kind to be observed at thermal infrared wavelengths.

This storm actually came around a few years earlier than expected, but the point is this: the last time a storm like this cropped up, we had no spacecraft in place to watch it unfold. What's more, with Cassini scheduled to plunge into Saturn in just five years, and no spacecraft scheduled to take its place, there are currently no plans to have another spacecraft whipping around the Saturnian system when the next planet-wide storm unfolds. Cassini is a champion, and consistently delivers not just beautiful images of some of the most photogenic astronomical bodies in our solar system, but damn good science.

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