Transcript

Narrator: Are there hurricanes on Saturn? From JPL -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I'm Jane Platt. Join us on a warp-speed podcast journey (warp sound) to the south pole of Saturn...one billion miles away. ...where three instruments on the Cassini spacecraft have spied something odd, yet oddly familiar.

Baines: It's a hurricane-like feature, it looks just like a hurricane on the Earth.

Narrator: How much like a hurricane?

Baines: In the sense that you have rings of clouds and you have a central eye that's relatively clear of clouds, and the ring of clouds around it rises to great heights. So it's a very strange phenomenon we didn't expect to find, but there it is.

Narrator: So, Dr. Kevin Baines of JPL, it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck...

Baines: But we're not saying it is a hurricane because after all, hurricanes on the Earth are powered by water sources, hurricanes that hit the East Coast are powered by water in the Atlantic Ocean that's warm.

Narrator: And as far as they know...no water oceans on Saturn.

Baines: So we don't really think it's exactly a hurricane, but it's a new kind of storm system that we haven't seen before in any of the planets out there, so this is a new phenomenon that we'd love to be able to figure out what's going on.

Narrator: Baines is a scientist with Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, which helps unlock the mysteries of Saturn -- which is much different than the terra firma we call home.

Baines: So remember Saturn is a big gas body, big fluid body of gases mostly. It's a whole alien type of a, kind of material there.

Narrator: Definitely a whopper storm. The eye nearly as big as Earth, winds gusting 350 miles per hour. So what does this have to do with us?

Baines: Every time we figure out dynamics or storm systems and how they behave on any planet, it directly is relevant to the Earth.

Narrator: Oh, and storms can tell us a whole lot about a planet.

Baines: When you have storms, they tend to dredge up materials from deep down below and so if you want to see what's in the deep part of a planet, then you can look in a storm system and see tracers of the material deep down.

Narrator: More info on this storm...and other Cassini discoveries -- at www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

Thanks for riding along on this warp-speed podcast journey from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.