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JPL Podcast -- Are There Hurricanes on Saturn?
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Nov. 9 , 2006
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+ Listen Now (running time 2:20, 2Mb MP3)
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+ (XML/URL)  http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcast/podfeed.xml |
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...
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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.
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