On Mar 30, 2:02 pm, The Hermit <oldweird...@mountaintop.com> wrote:

Bizarre Hexagon Spotted on Saturn SPACE.com Staff

SPACE.com
Tue Mar 27, 1:30 PM ET

One of the most bizarre weather patterns known has been photographed at
Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling
the north pole.

Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets
that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.

The honeycomb-like feature has been seen before. NASA's Voyager 1 and 2
spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it
with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting
oddity.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion
with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric
expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer
team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never
seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick
atmosphere, where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate,
is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric
figure, yet there it is."

The hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly
four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows the hexagon
extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

At Saturn's south pole, Cassini recently spotted a freaky human eye-like
feature that resembles a hurricane.

"It's amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of
Saturn's poles," said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and
infrared mapping spectrometer at the University of Arizona. "At the south
pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the
north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely
different."

The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate
and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago. The actual
rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain, which means nobody knows
exactly how long the planet's day is.

"Once we understand its dynamical nature, this long-lived, deep-seated
polar hexagon may give us a clue to the true rotation rate of the deep
atmosphere and perhaps the interior," Baines said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20070327/sc_space/bizarrehexagonspotted...
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--http://www.writingup.com/blog/jim_the_hermit

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20070327/sc_space/bizarrehexagonspotted...
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