Right now all eyes are on Saturn’s giant moon, Titan, but the ringed planet has been putting on a show of its own: massive thunderstorms, equatorial gales, and rippling clouds. Cassini is finding Saturn’s climate more Earth-like and changeable than anyone imagined.
One breakthrough occurred when atmospheric scientist Anthony Delgenio of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies noticed that storms coincided with electrostatic discharges. That means Saturn’s stormy atmosphere is spawning potent lightning. “Saturn apparently has thunderstorms just like on Earth, except maybe the altitude is different,” Delgenio says. The observed storm systems are about 30 miles deep, three times as large as those in Earth’s much shallower atmosphere.
Cassini has also turned up signs of big shifts in Saturn’s climate. Observations by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s clocked winds at Saturn’s equator at more than 1,000 miles per hour. The new measurements show equatorial winds have slowed to ...
