Like a red, red rose: NASA probe sees "inside" huge storm on Saturn

An orbiting space probe has captured images of a huge, red eye staring from the surface of Saturn - looking like a rose blossoming on the surface of the planet.

The “eye” is the centre of an enormous hurricane which sits at the planet's north pole - at 1,000 miles wide, it’s 20 times larger than the centre of hurricanes on Earth.

Winds whip the water vapour in the storm around at 330 miles per hour - and it is thought to have endured there for years. The storm was last imaged under sunlight by the Voyager probe in 1981.

The new image offers a new, detailed close-up view, taken using visible light, with false colour added to highlight the cloud formations.

It was captured by NASA’s Cassini orbiter, which has taken spectacular images of Saturn since it arrived near the solar system's sixth planet in 2004.

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Earlier Cassini images have shone light on Saturn’s mysterious weather systems - revealing a huge river which resembles the Nile Delta on Earth.

Cassini's observations brought the number of known moons of Saturn up to 60, using time-lapse photography to capture tiny moons which had been invisible to Earth-bound astronomers.












Cassini first observed the storm when it arrived at Saturn in 2004, having launched from Earth in 1997.

Saturn’s seasons last for years - so sunlight only “lit up” the storm once the equinox had passed in 2009. The new images were acquired by making Cassini orbit at a slightly jauntier angle - so the spacecraft could see the planet’s poles in sunlight.

“Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn’s equatorial plane,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The probe changes course by looping around Saturn’s icy moon Titan, using the moon’s gravity to steer.

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

Saturn lies 890 million miles from the Sun, on average - with no solid surface, the sixth planet from the sun is largely composed of helium and hydrogen, and would float if there was any body of water large enough to hold it.