Updated: November 18 '96
December 21, 1994
Photo Release No.: STScI-PRC94-53
Hubble Observes a New Saturn Storm
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the ringed planet Saturn, shows a rare storm that appears as a white arrowhead-shaped feature near the planet's equator. The storm is generated by an upwelling of warmer air, similar to a terrestrial thunderhead. The east-west extent of this storm is equal to the diameter of the Earth, some 12,700 Km (about 7,900 miles).
Hubble provides new details about the effects of Saturn's prevailing winds on the storm. The new image shows that the storm's motion and size have changed little since its discovery in September, 1994.
The storm was imaged with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) in
the wide field mode, on December 1, 1994, when Saturn was 1,455 million Km
(904 million miles) from the Earth.
The picture is a composite of images taken through different color filters
within a 6 minute interval, to create a "true-color" rendition of the planet.
The blue fringe on the right limb of the planet is an artifact of the image
processing used to compensate for the rotation of the planet between
exposures.
The Hubble images are sharp enough to reveal that Saturn's prevailing winds, shape a dark "wedge" that eats into the western (left) side of the bright central cloud. The planet's strongest eastward winds are at the latitude of the wedge. (clocked at 1,600 Km/h, or 1,000 miles per hour, from analysis of the Voyager Mission spacecraft images taken in 1980-81)
To the north of this arrowhead-shaped feature, the winds decrease, so that the storm center is moving eastward relative to the local flow. The clouds expanding north of the storm are swept westward by the winds at higher latitudes. The strong winds near the latitude of the dark wedge, blow over the northern part of the storm, creating a secondary disturbance that generates the faint white clouds to the east (right) of the storm center.
The storm's white clouds are ammonia ice crystals that form when an upward flow of warmer gases shoves its way through Saturn's frigid cloud tops. This current storm, is larger than the white clouds associated with minor storms, that have been reported more frequently as bright cloud features.
Hubble observed a similar, though larger, storm in September 1990, which was one of three major Saturn storms seen over the past two centuries. Although these events were separated by about 57 years (approximately 2 Saturnian years), there is yet no explanation why they apparently follow a cycle -- occurring when it is summer in Saturn's northern hemisphere.
Credit: Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University), D. Gilmore, L. Bergeron (STScI), and NASA
A full-sized version of this image, caption and press-release texts are available in the World-Wide Web, at http://www.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/94/53.html.
For more information from the Hubble Space Telescope, you can link to the Space Telescope Science Institute Home Page.
Updated: November 18 '96
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