Science/Tech

Saturn’s ‘Rose’ Storm Attracts Attention [VIDEO]

By Cheri Cheng | Update Date: Apr 30, 2013 09:30 AM EDT

The stunning and beautiful picture released by NASA as its image of the day has attracted millions of people. The spinning vortex, which looks like a hurricane on Earth, was named the Rose for its many spirals. According to NASA, the Rose is located on the northern pole of Saturn and its eye spans roughly 1,250 miles, which is nearly 20 times the size of an average hurricane seen from Earth. After giving the image false colors to emphasize the difference between the low clouds within the center of the vortex and the high clouds on the outside of the vortex, one can really see the massiveness of the storm. The Rose, with its red center and green outer rim, has truly captured the attention of many.

"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," Andrew Ingersoll, Cassini imaging team member of Caltech in Pasadena, CA said. "But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn's hydrogen atmosphere."

"The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon," NASA reported. The outer circles' edges of the Rose are believed to be moving at around 330 miles per hours. Since it exists on a pole, NASA analysts believe that it could be swirling in the same exact location for years, having no other place to drift to. NASA's Cassini spacecraft originally captured the image back in Nov. 27, 2012 with the help of spectral filters sensitive that are sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light.

"Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn's equatorial plane," said Scott Edgington, who is the deputy project scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory located in Pasadena, CA. Cassini was the first spacecraft to enter Saturn's orbit back in 2004 when it traveled 2.2 billion miles to get there.

The image was taken after Saturn passed its equinox, exposing the pole to sunlight after 2009. According to NASA, it takes Saturn around 30 years to orbit the sun, which means that equinox occurs nearly every 15 years. The last time NASA took sunlit pictures of Saturn's North Pole dates back to 1981 and the images were captured by Voyager 2.

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