Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Saturn’s all spun up. New views of the planet from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft reveal the full glory of the enormous cyclones spinning at the gas giant’s poles.

“These are truly massive cyclones, hundreds of times stronger than the most giant hurricanes on Earth,” Cassini scientist Kevin Baines of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, said in a JPL media release.

He added that Cassini revealed dozens of puffy, cumulus clouds swirling around both of Saturn’s poles, “betraying the presence of giant thunderstorms lurking beneath,” and that thunderstorms are thought to be the engine for these giant weather systems.

The eyes of Saturn’s and Earth’s storms look startlingly similar. Yet, Saturn’s hurricanes stay locked to the planet’s poles while terrestrial hurricanes move across the oceans. And unlike Earth-bound hurricanes, which are stirred up by the oceans’ heat and water, Saturn’s cyclones have no body of water to set them stewing.

The new Cassini images allowed JPL scientists to map the entire north pole of Saturn and to map time-lapse movies of the clouds circling the pole. The movies show that the planet’s northern whirlpool-like cyclone is rotating at 530 kilometres per hour.

As for Saturn’s south-pole cyclone, it has been observed before, but “what looked like puffy clouds in [past] lower resolution images are turning out to be deep convective structures seen through the atmospheric haze,” said Cassini scientist Tony DelGenio of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

The new images show that the clouds are strong convective storms that form a distinct, inner ring within the larger vortex of clouds. The new photos suggest that the inner ring is about half the diameter of the main ring of clouds, which is about 4,000 kilometers wide. The shadows of these water clouds suggest that they are 40 to 70 km above the inner-ring clouds.

Now, Cassini scientists are planning to monitor the storms to see how the cyclones change at Saturn’s poles as the planet’s season’s change from southern summer to fall in August 2009.