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My name is Brigette Hesman, and I'm a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center and I study storms on Saturn. A Great White Spot is a
massive storm system that erupts on Saturn about once every Saturn year.
The Great White Spot that erupted in December, 2010 first presented itself as
this fluffy white storm cloud that popped up in the northern hemisphere. The
storm when it erupted sent large waves up into the stratosphere and we saw
effects like an increased amount of ethylene, something we never expected to
see. In the coming days, the winds on Saturn sheared the storm in both
directions and it wrapped all the way across the planet. 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 would be
no escaping this storm system 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 happened 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 over all wavelength ranges. Some of the effects
that we got to see in the infrared were these two bright beacons that started to
shine right after the storm erupted in December. Those beacons at first showed
temperature differences of about 20 Kelvin, which is reasonable for a storm.
However, as time progressed we started to see even larger temperature changes. By
May 2011 the two beacons had merged into one, and we saw a temperature change of
over 80 Kelvin from the quiet conditions before the storm. So that would be like
going from the depths of winter in Fairbanks, Alaska to the height of summer
in the Mojave Desert, all in one storm system. Can you imagine what that would
feel like sitting on your deck? We've 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 allowing us to make a historical record
of this Great White Spot.
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