Saturn 'Hexagon' Video Spotlights Planet's Vast Six-Sided Jet Stream
The Huffington Post | By Cate Matthews Posted: 12/06/2013 3:47 pm EST
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oytwz_4eSCE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oytwz_4eSCE
Though best known for its rings, Saturn has another unusual--and unusually beautiful--feature. As you can see in spectacular new video footage taken by NASA's Saturn-orbiting space probe Cassini, the giant gaseous planet also sports a powerful six-sided jet stream that astronomers call "the hexagon."
First discovered by NASA's Voyager 1 space probe during its voyage through the outer solar system in the 1980s, the hexagon packs 200-mph winds and spans 20,000 miles across the planet's north pole. At its center is a giant rotating storm.
"The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable," Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., said in a written statement. "A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades--and who knows--maybe centuries."
What explains the hexagon's longevity? Astronomers say it may be because Saturn is composed of gas and thus, unlike Earth and other rocky planets, has no landforms to disrupt the fast-moving currents.
Saturn's orbit started to tilt its northern hemisphere toward the sun in late 2012, which better illuminated the hexagon and made this new video possible.
The images that make up the video, taken over a 10-hour period, are the first made using color filters that differentiate between the large and small haze particles that make up the hexagon. And while the images provide the best view yet of the hexagon, even better ones may be on the way.
"As we approach Saturn's summer solstice in 2017, lighting conditions over its north pole will improve, and we are excited to track the changes that occur both inside and outside the hexagon boundary," Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said in the written statement.
The Cassini spacecraft was launched in 1997 and has been orbiting Saturn since 2004
I see a Deuem still in there! :D
yeah, me too..i was going to just use the heading of
DEUEM TRAP...BEWARE ;D
Yea Deuem could do em for copyright ;D
It's D to a T.
(http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/43620656.jpg)
Wow, I was able to watch a few seconds of theis before getting tossed, I saw one split second of what looked like me? :o Am I getting famous that now I have copycats? I don't remember doing this hex at the POV in the video. I have done the hex but a different angle.
Call the laywers up.... ::)
Deuem Trap. lol ;) Deuem likes 7 sides with 4 walls. Figure that one out.
I will try and DL this video. Lots of traffic right now, net very slow.
And Z, doing it is simple, the hard part is putting it on line. A one minute can take me hours to upload from here. Takes the wind out of the sails. We have a vid section?
All my videos are slides made in Power point and then converted with a free vid program.
Deuem..
Here save this for later before I lose it,
UT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=oytwz_4eSCE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=oytwz_4eSCE)
SS
http://www.ssyoutube.com/watch?v=oytwz_4eSCE (http://www.ssyoutube.com/watch?v=oytwz_4eSCE)