Cassini Cameras Spot Powerful New Lightning Storm on Saturn

http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=1855

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
CASSINI IMAGING CENTRAL LABORATORY FOR OPERATIONS (CICLOPS)
SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, BOULDER, COLORADO
http://ciclops.org


Preston Dyches (720) 974-5859
CICLOPS/Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For Immediate Release: February 14, 2006

CASSINI CAMERAS SPOT POWERFUL NEW LIGHTNING STORM ON SATURN

Following the recent detection of Saturnian radio bursts by NASA's
Cassini spacecraft that indicated a rare and powerful atmospheric
storm,
Cassini imaging scientists have spotted the storm in an unlikely
fashion: they looked for it in the dark.

When lightning-generated radio noise from the storm was detected by
Cassini on January 23, the spacecraft was at a place in its orbit where
it was unable to image the sunlit side of Saturn. Instead, imaging
scientists searched for the southern hemisphere storm in images of the
planet's night side. Fortunately, the small amount of sunlight
reflecting off Saturn's rings and illuminating the night side is enough
to make features in the atmosphere visible.

Images showing the storm can be found at http://ciclops.org,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

The storm is located on the side of Saturn that faces the spacecraft
when the radio emissions are detected; Cassini does not observe the
radio emissions for half a Saturnian day when the storm is on the
planet's other side.

The latitude of the new storm matches that of the "Dragon storm," which
was a powerful emitter of radio noise and was imaged by Cassini in
2004.
It lies in a region of the southern hemisphere referred to as "storm
alley" by scientists because of the high level of storm activity
observed there by Cassini. The storm's north-south dimension is about
3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles).

"It's really the only large storm on the whole planet," says Andrew
Ingersoll, a member of the Cassini imaging team. "It's in the right
place and it appeared at the right time to match the radio emissions,
so
it has to be the right storm," he said.

Cassini's investigation of the storm has also been aided by the efforts
of Earth-based amateur astronomers, who were able view Saturn's dayside
with their telescopes when Cassini could not. The amateurs' images of
Saturn provided the first visual confirmation of the storm, now
revealed
in detail by the new views from Cassini.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two
onboard
cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team
consists of scientists from the U.S., England, France, and Germany. The
imaging operations center and team leader (Dr. C. Porco) are based at
the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

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