Nasa news saturn8/23/2023 But the long darkness of Saturnian winter hid the hexagon from Cassini's visible-light cameras for years. Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, has a better angle for viewing the north pole. The jet stream is believed to whip along the hexagon at around 100 meters per second (220 miles per hour).Įarly hexagon images from Voyager and ground-based telescopes suffered from poor viewing perspectives. It encircles Saturn at about 77 degrees north latitude and has been estimated to have a diameter wider than two Earths. The hexagon was originally discovered in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. "It's a mystery on par with the strange weather conditions that give rise to the long-lived Great Red Spot of Jupiter." "The longevity of the hexagon makes this something special, given that weather on Earth lasts on the order of weeks," said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at the California Institute of Technology. Much to the delight and bafflement of Cassini scientists, the location and shape of the hexagon in the latest images match up with what they saw in the Voyager pictures. After the sunlight faded, darkness shrouded the north pole for 15 years. The last visible-light images of the entire hexagon were captured by NASA's Voyager spacecraft nearly 30 years ago, the last time spring began on Saturn. Images and the three-frame animation are available at, and. ![]() The new images of the hexagon, whose shape is the path of a jet stream flowing around the north pole, reveal concentric circles, curlicues, walls and streamers not seen in previous images. After waiting years for the sun to illuminate Saturn's north pole again, cameras aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft have captured the most detailed images yet of the intriguing hexagon shape crowning the planet.
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