A rare and huge storm was detected on Saturn which was recorded by the Cassini Spacecraft.
According to NASA, a rare storm which occurred on Saturn hit temperatures of 150 degrees Fahrenheit. An enormous amount of ethylene appeared out of nowhere which is a colorless and odorless gas usually not seen on Saturn. As the storm went around the planet it had a merging point which produced 100 times more ethylene than it was expected to be possible on Saturn.
"It's a very exciting thing ... a once-in-a-lifetime thing," Brigette Hesman, a scientist at University of Maryland and the Goddard Spaceflight Center, told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday morning. The information was sent to earth and the storm was recorded December 2010.
"The reason we call it the burp is, essentially, the storm erupted from below and all this energy moved into the stratosphere," Hesman said. "This temperature spike is so extreme it's almost unbelievable. To get a temperature change of the same scale on Earth, you'd be going from the depths of winter in Fairbanks, Alaska, to the height of summer in the Mojave Desert."
Hesman said the storm was a historical record.
"We did not have the technology the last time this type of storm erupted," she said. "This is our first really thorough historical record. In generations to come, when they study storms on Saturn, this is what they'll come back to."
Cassini used Composite Infrared Spectometer, CIRS to analyze the storm and measured temperature and large quantity of different types of molecules said Scott Edgington, Deputy Project scientist with the Cassini spacecraft, in an interview with The Times.
"That instrument saw a drastic rise in temperature, about 80 degrees Kelvin, or 150 degrees Fahrenheit, above normal," Edgington said, "which is unprecedented for anything we've ever seen in the solar system."
Edgington said that the cause of these molecules to be present in such large proportions is mysterious.
Cassini will be crushed and vaporized as its orbits will take the spacecraft closer to Saturn and when enters the planet's atmosphere it will be plunged in Saturn. Cassini has logged more than 3.8 billion miles in space and will end its existence by Sept. 15, 2017.
