Saturn Hurricane "spectacular-looking"

November 11th, 2006

Houston, TX - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has seen a hurricane-like storm raging at Saturn's south pole, new images from the space probe reveal.

A hurricane-like storm is raging at Saturn's south pole, new images from Nasa's Cassini space probe reveal.

The 5,000 mile wide storm is the first hurricane ever detected on a planet other than Earth.

Scientists say the storm has the eye and eye-wall clouds characteristic of a hurricane and its winds are swirling clockwise at around 350 mph.

Unlike Earth hurricanes it seems stuck at the southern pole, not drifting.

"It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane," Dr Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California Institute of Technology said. "Whatever it is, we're going to focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it's there."

Though Jupiter's Great Red Spot storm moves anti-clockwise, and is far bigger than the storm on Saturn, it does not have the eye and eye-wall that mark out a hurricane.

"We've never seen anything like this before. It's a spectacular-looking storm" Michael Flasar a NASA astrophysicist said.