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[FONT size=4]Spacecraft beams back images of Saturn hurricane[/FONT][/H3] At the south pole of Saturn, a massive hurricane-like storm with a diametre of 8,000 kilometres, is raging.
The gale was captured by NASA's Cassini space probe, and is the first hurricane ever detected on another planet.
The dramatic images show a large storm mass with concentric circles leading into the core of the disturbance, which resembles a human eye.
Scientists say that the eye, and cloud formations within the storm, are characteristic of a hurricane with winds swirling clockwise at a tremendous 550 kph.
The eye of the storm is actually ringed by clouds that soar from 30 to 75 kilometres in height -- as much as five times higher than hurricane clouds on Earth.
Scientists say the formation looks like a hurricane but isn't behaving like one -- staying firmly situated on the south pole of the planet, while hurricanes on earth typically shift position.
And because Saturn is a gaseous planet, the storm formed without an ocean at its base,
"It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane," Dr Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California Institute of Technology said.
"Whatever it is, we're going to focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it's there."
The Cassini images are some of the clearest pictures yet of Saturn.
"The clear skies over the eye appear to extend down to a level about twice as deep as the usual cloud level observed on Saturn," said Dr. Kevin H. Baines of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
"This gives us the deepest view yet into Saturn over a wide range of wavelengths, and reveals a mysterious set of dark clouds at the bottom of the eye."
It's not the first time scientists have observed a storm on another planet. Jupiter's Great Red Spot storm is much bigger than the Saturn storm, but lacks the eye and eye-wall clouds that define a hurricane.
NASA's Michael Flasar described the scene as resembling water swirling down a bathtub drain.
"We've never seen anything like this before," Flasar told Reuters news service. "It's a spectacular-looking storm."
Cassini, which moved into the ringed planet's orbit on July 1, 2004, captured 14 frames of the storm over a three-hour period on Oct. 11.
The spacecraft is orbiting Saturn at a distance of about 340,000 kilometres.
[FONT size=1]A swirling hurricane-like vortex at Saturn's south pole, where the vertical structure of the clouds is highlighted by shadows. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)[/FONT]
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