Thanks to recent photography taken of the planet, mysteries behind Saturn's weather history have been revealed, ScienceRecorder.com reported.
The biggest mystery, by far, was a massive hurricane found on Saturn's north pole. NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured images and videos of the massive hurricane, estimated to have an eye 1,250 miles wide. The hurricane resembled that of an earthly hurricane, only 20 times larger than Earth's average.
"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a JPL press release. "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."
There is no body of water around where the Saturn hurricane formed, but scientists are planning on using the data to better understand Earth's hurricanes. Aside from size, the main difference between the two planets' hurricanes is that Saturn's has stayed locked into one spot, while hurricanes on Earth drift north.
"The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that's likely why it's stuck at the pole," Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia, said in a JPL press release.
According to ScienceRecorder.com, the team of scientists put together the first-ever topographical map of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The map will help scientists and researchers understand the terrain beneath the dense layers of methane.
"Titan has so much interesting activity - like flowing liquids and moving sand dunes - but to understand these processes it's useful to know how the terrain slopes," Ralph Lorenz, a lead map-designing member of the Cassini spacecraft's radar team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., said in a statement. "It's especially helpful to those studying hydrology and modeling Titan's climate and weather, who need to know whether there is high ground or low ground driving their models."
Before the topographical map, the methane layers in the moon's atmosphere made it difficult for scientists to study the surface, leaving most data to guess work.
Steve Wall, deputy team leader of Cassini's radar team at NASA's JPL, said in a statement that having the 3D model will help make the "fascinating and dynamic" moon "pop out."
Cassini ends its mission in 2017.
"On Earth, rivers, volcanoes and even weather are closely related to heights of surfaces," Wall said. "We're now eager to see what we can learn from them on Titan."
