A massive blizzard is raging on Saturn - a storm so large and fierce NASA astronomers and amateur skywatchers can see it from earth.NASA's Cassiniacecraft currentlyorbiting Saturn has a front row seat to the otherworlfly tempest and is recording data yet of storms on the ringed planet. But amateur astromers back on earth have also managed to chip in on Saturn blizzard stormwatch.
"We are so excited to get a heads-up from the amateurs,"said Cassini scientist Gordon Bjoaker, a composite infered spectrometer team member based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The data showed a large, turbulent storm, dreging up a lot of material from the deep atmosphere and coving an area at least five times larger than the biggest blizzard that hit that hit the earth so far this year - the "Snowmageddon" storm that blanketed the Washington, D.C. area in snow in February.
Cassini's radio and plasma wave instrument and imaging cameras have been tracking thunder and lighting storms on Saturn for years in a region around Saturn's mid-latitudes that is nicknamed "storm alley." But. gathering data on storms on Saturn requires a tricky balance act, since storms on Saturn can come go on a time scale of weeks, while Cassini's imaging and spectrometer observations have to be locked in place months in advance. Given these limitations, NASA sometime enlists the help of amateur astronomers.
The radio and plasma wave instrument regularly picks up electrostatic discharges that are associated with the storms, so scientists have been sending perodic tips to amateurs, who can quickly go to their backyard telescopes and try to spy the bright convective storm clouds. Anthony Wesley - who is based in Australia and was the first person to spot the aftermath of an comet impact on Jupiter last summer - sent Cassini scientists an e-mail with a picture of the strom attached. I wanted to be sure that images like these was being seen by the cassini team just in case this was something of interest to be imaged directly by Cassini or the Hubble Space Telescope, Wesley wrote.Cassini scientists analyzed all the images in detail, including a picture from March 13 of the storm at it's peak, taken by Go, who lives in the Philippines.
The spectrometer data also showed that tropospause , which is the dividing line between the serene stratosphere and the lower churning troposphere, was about 1 degree Fahrenheit ( minus 17.2 degrees Celsius ) colder in the storm cell than in neighboring areas.
"A balloonist floating about 100 kilometers (62 miles) down from the bottom of Saturn's calm startosphere would experience an ammonia-ice blizzzard with the intensity of Snowmageddon, said Brigette Hesman, a composite infrared spectrometer team member and research scientist ay the University of Maryland.
The blizzards appear to be powered by violent storms deeper down - perhaps another 100 to 200 kilometers (62 to 124 miles ) down - where lighting has been observed and the clouds are made of water and ammonia, Hesman said.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint project of NASA, the Europeon Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The composite infrared spectrometer team is based at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
My spin on storms everywhere: If we don't get busy now and put a halt to climate change or at least slow it down...this may be what we have to expect in the near future. But hey, that's just me.
Until next time just hanging out and keeping it real.
