Saturcane

[NefariousSaint]

Nov. 10, 2006 — Saturn has cooked up a sizeable storm that is the first in the solar system besides Earth to feature a hurricane-like eye and well-formed towers of clouds.

Though smaller than the famed Great Red Spot churning away on Saturn's giant neighbor, Jupiter, the Saturn storm is still formidable. It sprawls for about two-thirds the diameter of Earth across Saturn's southern pole.

"It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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[Richard Bell]

Fascinating photos.

The Discovery article notes that they were taken by NASA's Cassini probe.

It's also interesting to read that the wind speeds are twice that of Katrina.

[NefariousSaint]

Huge fan of Cassini I am. Should be interesting to see what it captures next. It has a close flyby of Titan coming up on the 12th of December so I'm sure there will be something new to put up.

[Richard Bell]

Titan is an amazing place. Thick, ozone rich atmosphere and quite probably, a vast sea of liquid nitrogen.

They were talking about Titan the other day on CBC Radio One's "Quirks And Quarks".

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/

Every time I hear about Titan, I can picture the deliberately cheesy 1950's cover of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, "The Sirens Of Titan".

Unfortunately, I don't think Cassini will find any evidence of a race of fabulous babes !

[Richard Bell]

NefariousSaint;457504 wrote: Huge fan of Cassini I am. Should be interesting to see what it captures next. It has a close flyby of Titan coming up on the 12th of December so I'm sure there will be something new to put up.


They were discussing it today on CBC Radio's Quirks And Quarks. Turns out that Titan is dotted with liquid methane lakes, some as big as 70 km wide. The temperature is -165C :

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[Lulu2]

(Nefarious...where've you been? I missed you!)