Monster storm on Saturn reveals water and hidden layers

A massive storm rages on Saturn once every 30 years, which mixes up the atmosphere and reveals some of its hidden secrets. The most recent mega-storm arrived on the ringed planet about 10 years ahead of schedule, from December 2010 to August 2011, said Lawrence Sromovsky, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The storm grew quickly from a small white dot first detected by NASA's Cassini probe on Dec. 5, 2010, to a spot about the size of Earth by the end of the month, writes Deborah Netburn for the Los Angeles Times. By the end of January 2011, the storm had totally encircled the planet at a latitude of 30 degrees. The mega-storm raged on for seven more months, releasing static electric charges indicative of lightning and causing fierce vertical winds that blew up to 300 mph.

The storm also allowed scientists a rare opportunity to glimpse the hidden layers of Saturn's thick atmosphere. Scientists have hypothesized that Saturn's atmosphere is stacked like a layer cake, with water vapor clouds at the bottom, followed by a layer of ammonia hydrosulfide clouds and pure ammonia clouds near the top. But this structure has been difficult to observe because the surface of Saturn is obscured by a thick haze that is difficult to penetrate.

The storm temporarily changed all that. As the storm's fierce winds cut through the haze, Cassini was able to observe the cloud tops in near-infrared light, revealing a very different infrared color signature than the one produced by haze particles in the surrounding atmosphere. Sromovsky and his team recently analyzed that data and discovered that cloud particles at the top of the storm were probably made of water ice, ammonia ice and a third substance that might be ammonium sulfide. This is the first time that water ice has been detected on Saturn.

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