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My name is Bridget Hesman and I'm a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center. And I studies storms on Saturn.
Great white spots on Saturn are these large storms that erupt about once every
year on Saturn, a year on Saturn is 29 Earth years. So about every 30 years we
see a great white spot erupted on Saturn.
The great white spot that it erupted in
December 2010. Initially presented itself as a small little white fluffy cloud
that came up. And a various instruments on Cassini were seeing it, and
ground-based instruments seeing it as well. And as the day's progressed the
storm got larger and then it got sheared from the top in the bottom of the storm
on either side of it and it wrapped all the way across the planet over the next
few months. If you were to scale that to a storm system here on the Earth what
you would have is a storm system that covers all of North America but wraps
around the entire planet. There'd be no escaping the storm system if you lived
in North America and it would be lasting for a very long time. This great white
spot happened to occur ten years before we expected it which was very fortunate
because we happen to have a spacecraft called Cassini in orbit around Saturn.
And that spacecraft has a full suite of instrumentation that allows us to study
this great white spot over all wavelength ranges. We never before been
able to study a storm system of this magnitude in the infrared so we are very
fortunate at this time to have a spacecraft in orbit and excellent
ground-based facilities allowing us to make a historical record of this great
white spots. And that will allow us to compare it in future generations when
the next one happens.