Titan’s surface, remember that with thick
hazy atmosphere, you cannot actually
see the surface from above.
Recently Cassini measured the depth
of Titan’s second largest sea, Ligeia Mare,
to be about 560 feet in depth. Since
Titan’s water bodies are mostly Methane
plane,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini
deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
“You cannot see the polar regions very
well from an equatorial orbit. Observing
the planet from different vantage points
reveals more about the cloud layers that
cover the entirety of the planet.”
Cassini changes its orbital inclination for
such an observing campaign only once
every few years. Because the spacecraft
change the angle of its orbit, the inclined
trajectories require attentive oversight
from navigators. The path requires careful
planning years in advance and sticking
very precisely to the planned itinerary to
ensure enough propellant is available for
the spacecraft to reach future planned
orbits and encounters.
In comparison to hurricanes on Earth,
the one on Saturn is gigantic with the eye
of the storm being roughly 50 times larger
than the eye of a hurricane on Earth at
approximately 1,250 miles across. Wind
speeds at the outer edge of the storm
are around 340 MPH. Unlike hurricanes
on Earth, this storm does not migrate; it
is stuck in what is essentially a stationary
-
through the smoggy atmosphere of Titan,
the bottom.
Cassini also discovered a huge
hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north
pole just last year. Even though Cassini has
been in orbit since 2004, the polar region
was dark due to the northern hemisphere
being in winter. The composite infrared
spectrometer and the visual and infrared
mapping spectrometer detected a
massive vortex quite some time ago.
However it could not be seen until
recently with winter ending in the
northern hemisphere. “Such a stunning
and mesmerizing view of the hurricanelike 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
26
26
tend to drift northward because of the
forces acting on the fast swirls of wind as
the planet rotates. The
one on Saturn is already
as far north as it can be.
The end result is a strong
swirling storm, with no
place to go.
“The polar hurricane
has nowhere else to go,
and that’s likely why
it’s stuck at the pole,”
said Kunio Sayanagi, a
Cassini imaging team
associate at Hampton
University in Virginia.
Unrelated
to
the
hurricane in the polar
region,
a
massive
thunder and Lightning
storm was detected Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
in
Saturn’s
northern
hemisphere. After forming, the turbulent
head of the storm moved west and
spawned a clockwise rotating vortex that
followed the same path but more slowly.
In a matter of just a few months the storm
encircled the entire planet, stretching
some 190,000 miles, with thunder and
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