World News – For anyone looking to travel to the North Pole of Saturn this weekend, you might want to wait until a huge hurricane category 100 passes.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on board camera has captured stunning views of a huge hurricane at Saturn’s North Pole.
The eye of the cyclone is an enormous 2,010 kilometers across.
That size to be put in perspective is about 20 times larger than the typical eye of a hurricane on Earth.
Saturn’s hurricane swirls inside a six-sided vortex. Unlike hurricanes on Earth, which tend to drift northward as our planet rotates, the Saturn storm and its hexagonal vortex have been stationary at the north pole.
Clouds at the outer edge of the storm are beig clocked at close to 531 kilometers per hour.
The hurricane is parked at Saturn’s North Pole and relies on water vapor to keep it churning. It’s believed to have been there for years. Cassini only recently had a chance to observe the vortex in visible light.
Scientists hope to learn more about Earth’s hurricanes by studying this whopper at Saturn.
Cassini was launched from Cape Canaveral in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004.
