A bright, powerful, lightning-producing storm churns and coasts along the
lane of Saturn's southern hemisphere nicknamed "Storm Alley" by scientists.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected this particular tempest after nearly
two years during which Saturn did not appear to produce any large
electrical storms of this kind. The storm appears as a bright, irregular
splotch on the planet near lower right.
Lightning flashes within the persistent storm produce radio waves, called
Saturn Electrostatic Discharges, which the Cassini radio and plasma wave
science instrument first detected on Nov. 27, 2007. Cassini's imaging
cameras then spotted the storm, taking the images used to create this
color view about a week later on Dec. 6.
This electrical storm is similar in appearance and intensity to those
previously monitored by Cassini. All of these powerful electrostatic
producing storms appeared at about 35 degrees south latitude on Saturn.
(See PIA07788, PIA08142 and PIA06197 for additional images of Saturn's
electrical storms imaged by Cassini.)
This storm has now been continuously tracked by Cassini for several
months, whereas previous storms observed by the spacecraft lasted for less
than 30 days: See PIA08411 for images of the storm acquired three months
after this view. The view looks toward the un-illuminated side of the
rings from about 5 degrees above the ringplane. Tethys (1,071 kilometers,
or 665 miles across) is seen here in the foreground, and casts its shadow
onto the high northern latitudes.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.7 million
kilometers (1 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 97 kilometers (60
miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. The radio and plasma wave science team
is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org. The radio and plasma wave science instrument team home
page is at http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/plasma-wave/cassini/home.html.
