Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The image above essentially
uses false coloring to show detail, but here is what it shows: a huge hurricane
on Saturn that is 2,000 kilometers across. Researchers are also approximating
that the hurricane's winds are getting a stormy 330mph. The image was taken by
the Cassini spacecraft and released by NASA. While this is one powerful storm, researchers
were amazed by how much the storm seems to look like one on Earth.
"We did a double take
when we saw this vortex," said Andrew Ingersoll, a associate of the
Cassini imaging group.
This image is among the first sunny
sights of Saturn's North Pole caught by Cassini's imaging cameras. The photos
were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2012, by
means of a mixture of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of
near-infrared light. The photos filtered at 890 nanometers are projected as
blue. The photos filtered at 752 nanometers are visible as red and the photos
filtered at 728 nanometers are visible as green. In this arrangement, red specifies
low clouds and green specifies high ones.
The sight was picked up at a
distance of approximately 261,000 miles from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft
angle of 94 degrees. Photo scale is 1 mile per pixel.
See the Full size Image here.
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