JPL: Cassini and Amateurs Chase Storm on Saturn

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bystander
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JPL: Cassini and Amateurs Chase Storm on Saturn

Post by bystander » Thu Apr 29, 2010 4:25 pm

Cassini and Amateurs Chase Storm on Saturn
NASA JPL Cassini - 29 April 2010
With the help of amateur astronomers, the composite infrared spectrometer instrument aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken its first look at a massive blizzard in Saturn's atmosphere. The instrument collected the most detailed data to date of temperatures and gas distribution in that planet's storms.

The data showed a large, turbulent storm, dredging up loads of material from the deep atmosphere and covering an area at least five times larger than the biggest blizzard in this year's Washington, D.C.-area storm front nicknamed "Snowmageddon."

"We were so excited to get a heads-up from the amateurs," said Gordon Bjoraker, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Normally, he said, "Data from the storm cell would have been averaged out."
...
In late March, Wesley, an amateur astronomer from Australia who was actually the first person to detect the new dark spot caused by an impact on Jupiter last summer, sent Cassini scientists an e-mail with a picture of the storm.

"I wanted to be sure that images like these were being seen by the Cassini team just in case this was something of interest to be imaged directly by Cassini or the Hubble Space Telescope," Wesley wrote.

Cassini scientists eagerly pored through the images, including a picture of the storm at its peak on March 13 by Go, who lives in the Philippines.

By a stroke of luck, the composite infrared spectrometer happened to be targeting the latitude of the storms. The instrument's scientists knew there could be storms there, but didn't know when they might be active.

Data obtained by the spectrometer on March 25 and 26 showed larger than expected amounts of phosphine, a gas typically found in Saturn's deep atmosphere and an indicator that powerful currents were dredging material upward into the upper troposphere. The spectrometer data also showed another signature of the storm: the tropopause, the dividing line between the serene stratosphere and the lower, churning troposphere, was about 0.5 Kelvin (1 degree Fahrenheit) colder in the storm cell than in neighboring areas.
Image
Amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley obtained this image of a storm on Saturn from his backyard telescope in Murrumbateman,
Australia, on March 22, 2010. He sent it to scientists working with NASA's Cassini spacecraft the next day. (A. Wesley)


Image
Amateur astronomer Christopher Go took this image of the storm on March 13, 2010. The arrow indicates the location of the storm
and the red outlines show where Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer gathered data. (C.Go and NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC)

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neufer
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Re: JPL: Cassini and Amateurs Chase Storm on Saturn

Post by neufer » Thu Apr 29, 2010 4:46 pm

It's true!

Australians do see everything upside down.
Art Neuendorffer

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