Saturn in Infrared from Cassini

Saturn looks slightly different in infrared light. Bands of clouds show great structure, including long stretching storms. Also quite striking in infrared is the unusual hexagonal cloud pattern surrounding Saturn’s North Pole. Each side of the dark hexagon spans roughly the width of our Earth. The hexagon’s existence was not predicted, and its origin and likely stability remain a topics of research. Saturn’s famous rings circle the planet and cast shadows below the equator. The featured image was taken by the robotic Cassini spacecraft in 2014 in several infrared colors. In 2017 September, the Cassini mission was brought to a dramatic conclusion when the spacecraft was directed to dive into the ringed giant.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] #space #science #nasa #astronomy

    • @[email protected]
      2•9 hours ago

      One of the most curious and captivating features on Saturn – an enormous spinning hexagon in the clouds at its north pole – has fascinated scientists and the public alike since our first glimpse of it in the 1980s.

      A trove of images and data from the Cassini probe that orbited Saturn from 2004-2017 provided some surprising answers, but not all of them, heightening the mystery even more.

      Saturn’s Perplexing Hexagon

    • @meco03211English
      4•12 hours ago

      My first thought was how beehives are hexagons. Makes for good packing as they use 100% of a flat surface. But a singular one on a sphere still boggles the mind.

    • KrikEnglish
      3•12 hours ago

      It’s an emergent property caused by multiple storms, the rotation of the planet and ‘simple’ wave patterns. Even Earth sometimes develop a hexagons caused by jetstreams and ocean currents. But they are way more unstable than the Saturn one.