Merging Saturnian Storms

Three months before its scheduled arrival at Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft has observed two storms in the act of merging. With diameters close to 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), both storms, which appear as spots in the southern hemisphere, were seen moving west, relative to the rotation of Saturn's interior, for about a month before they merged on March 19 through 20, 2004. This set of eight images was taken between Feb. 22 and March 22, 2004. The top four frames span 26 days. They are portions of images from the narrow angle camera taken through a filter accepting light in the near-infrared region of the spectrum centered at 619 nanometers, and they show two storms approaching each other. Both storms are located at 36 degrees south latitude and sit in an anti-cyclonic shear zone, which means that the flow to the north is westward relative to the flow to the south. Consequently, the northern storm moves westward at a slightly greater rate than the southern one, 11 meters versus 6 meters per second (25 and 13 mph), respectively. The storms drift with these currents and engage in a counterclockwise dance before merging with each other. The bottom four frames are from images taken on

Date

2004-04-08

Photographer / author

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Collection

JPL

Archive

NASA Image and Video Library

Type

photograph

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