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Cassini Observes Hurricane-Like Storm On Saturn
Aglassis writes "The Cassini spacecraft recently observed a hurricane-like storm on the south pole of Saturn. What makes this storm particularly interesting is that this is the first time that a clearly defined eyewall has been seen outside of the Earth in the Solar System. Neither the Great White Spot of Saturn nor the Great Red Spot of Jupiter have had an observable eyewall. NASA, JPL, and the Space Science Institute have released a short movie of the motion around the eyewall (mirrored at YouTube)."
Ya see, Bush is so mad about the elections he's putting hurricanes on the Saturnurians now. What next, blizzards on Venus??
Although I don't think this one led to 1200 dead or left to die.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
It's big, it's hot, and it is slightly variable.
It's an alien transportation portal!
I for one welcome our gas giant portal-creating overlords and any new cliches they can teach us!
For you folks that actually get up when it is still dark, Saturn is really nice this season:
Saturn (magnitude +0.5, in Leo), rises around 11:30 or midnight and is in fine view high in the southeast by early dawn. Regulus, about half as bright, sparkles 5 below Saturn after they rise. By dawn Regulus is to Saturn's lower left.
http://skytonight.com/observing/ataglance
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Well?
For those interested, unmannedspaceflight has active discussions on well.. unmanned space flight, and in particular, this mission. Cassini is another successful unmanned mission. Space is really starting to get exciting again.
The moon has a mass of 7.36 × 10^22 kilograms. Assuming you are feisty, you might have a 10 kg hammer. The moon is 730,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more massive than the hammer. It won't even notice it.
If this is more you being bizzaro than it is a bizzaro troll, good luck with that.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Thank you Slashdot for providing me with my area's forcast
cuz, you know, has so much more geek cred than youtube. And imeem's video uploader didn't try to squish the 1:1 aspect ratio into 4:3 so it looks a lot better.
...that's Great Caesar's Goatse!!! Be VERY afraid.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
So now home insurance premiums on Saturn are going to go through the roof!
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Eww, it looks like a butthole.
Whatever, man, the fact is that Neil Armstrong lied to us. And we gobbled it up. So what else are those phonies at NASA lying to us about? HMMMM?
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Newtonian Zen: Does it exist if it cannot be observed?
TFA: If you go to youtube, give the cassini (and other space exploration) videos a go and rate them, it will encourage them (and others) to put up more.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Obviously, this has something to do with global warming. Is the SUV's driven by left-wing soccer moms in Seattle? Or do the folks on Saturn have SUV's? Could it be the Sun has something against the rest of the solar system is just plain getting hotter? Ask Mars, he's warming up as well.
Man is a pissant when it comes to contributing to global temperatures. We are distracting ourselves from more important things that we can control, like poverty, hunger, disease, wars, and those "Head On" commercials.
Let's stop the environmental-tilting-at-windmills and fix the things we can fix. Let's expend our energies and limited electorate-goodwill where we can truly be effective.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
After staring at it for a few seconds I expected James Bond to appear and shoot at me.
You can get the press-release from the source at http://ciclops.org/view_event.php?id=57, if you so desire.
You forgot the 3 micron clump of moon-dust located directly below (with respect to the moon's center of gravity), ergo the feather hits first. Spatial bodies are not, in general, perfect spheres.
Aikon-
[...] below the *feather* [...]
/sigh =/
This would have been a better article if it had been about Uranus.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
This image and its' writeup on the Cassini Website says this hurricane cut 20-45 miles through Saturn's cloud cover. The Cassini Team was able to calculate this figure from the way the Sun's shadow deepened on the 3 hour (14 frames) image.
My questions are:
1) how thick was the remaining cloud layer, and
2) would it be possible to get a view of Saturn's surface?
As JPL is involved, the public does not have rights to use that film. Despite taxes paying for the work, government contractors such as JPL own the work and only let the U.S. government use it.
thatr was reminded of goats.ex?
Not to go ruining perfectly wonderful Bush/Katrina/goatse discussions by talking about science, but I thought I'd point out why this is actually really interesting to a lot of people outside of NASA. There are a large subset of people studying the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn because they provide really nice examples of atmospheric processes on Earth under more "ideal" circumstances. The typical storm on Jupiter or Saturn behaves much more similarly to a mid-latitude storm on Earth from a fluid mechanics point of view, meaning their energy source is related to temperature gradients or horizontal wind-shear. This is the first example of a system that behaves much more like a tropical storm does on Earth, which feed on latent energy. On Earth these systems depend critically on moisture and condensation (hence their connection with the ocean), so I'd be very very interested to find out what is the energy source for this storm on Saturn. It implies that either there is an upwelling heat source or some sort of condensable species in the atmosphere of Saturn, given the mechanics of this type of storm depend on latent heat release to form.
Seriously, if you have hardware that is working fine with Windows XP or Win 2k3 Server, what possible reason do you have for taking a risky manuver like the Vista "upgrade"? A saner "migration plan" is to use the machine as is till it fails.
Contrary to what Microsoft wants you to believe, if your machine functions today it suddenly will not "suck" the day Vista comes out. Stay with what works *now* instead of doing untested upgrades.
Just imagine how long it is going to take FEMA to respond to this one!