| The new details about this storm complement atmospheric disturbances described recently by scientists using Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope | |
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| Weather on Saturn appears to hum along placidly for years and then erupt violently | " The storm's results are the first activities of a new "Saturn Storm Watch" campaign |
" At its most intense, the storm generated more than 10 lightning flashes per second.
| Brown 202-358-1726 NASA Headquarters, Washington dwayne | NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured images in 1990 of an equally large storm |
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| Even with millisecond resolution, the spacecraft's radio and plasma wave instrument had difficulty separating individual signals during the most intense period | "This storm is thrilling because it shows how shifting seasons and solar illumination can dramatically stir up the weather on Saturn," said Georg Fischer, the paper's lead author and a radio and plasma wave science team member at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz |
| Because analysis on that image was not completed immediately, Fischer sent out a notice to the worldwide amateur astronomy community to collect more images | During this effort, Cassini looks at likely storm locations on Saturn in between its scheduled observations |
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| The storm is the biggest observed by spacecraft orbiting or flying by Saturn | "Cassini shows us that Saturn is bipolar," said Andrew Ingersoll, an author of the study and a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif |
Those storms rolled through an area in the southern hemisphere dubbed "Storm Alley.