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[ Music ]

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My name is Brigette Hesman, and I'm a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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and I study storms on Saturn.

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A Great White Spot is a massive storm system that erupts on Saturn about once every Saturn year.

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The Great White Spot that erupted in December, 2010 first presented itself as this

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fluffy white storm cloud that popped up in the northern hemisphere.

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The storm when it erupted sent large waves up into the stratosphere

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and we saw effects like an increased amount of ethylene, something we never expected to see.

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In the coming days, the winds on Saturn sheared the storm in both directions

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and it wrapped all the way across the planet.

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If you were to scale that to a storm system here on the Earth,

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what you would have is a storm system that covers all of North America but wraps around the entire planet.

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There would be no escaping this storm system and it would be lasting for a very long time.

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This Great White Spot happened to occur ten years before we expected it,

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which was very fortunate because we happened to have a spacecraft called Cassini in orbit around Saturn,

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and that spacecraft has a full suite of instrumentation that allows us to study this over all wavelength ranges.

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Some of the effects that we got to see in the infrared were these two bright beacons

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that started to shine right after the storm erupted in December.

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Those beacons at first showed temperature differences of about 20 Kelvin, which is reasonable for a storm.

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However, as time progressed we started to see even larger temperature changes.

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By May 2011 the two beacons had merged into one,

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and we saw a temperature change of over 80 Kelvin from the quiet conditions before the storm.

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So that would be like going from the depths of winter in Fairbanks, Alaska

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to the height of summer in the Mojave Desert, all in one storm system.

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Can you imagine what that would feel like sitting on your deck?

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We've never before been able to study a storm system of this magnitude in the infrared,

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so we are very fortunate at this time to have a spacecraft in orbit