Huge storm observed on Saturn

PASADENA, Calif., July 6 (UPI) -- NASA says its Cassini spacecraft has captured the first-ever, up-close details of a giant storm on Saturn that is eight times the surface area of Earth.

Cassini first detected the storm on Dec. 5, 2010, and it has been raging ever since, captured by the spacecraft's imaging camera as is wraps around the entire planet, covering about 1.5 billion square miles.

"Cassini shows us that Saturn is bipolar," said Andrew Ingersoll, an author of the study and a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "Saturn is not like Earth and Jupiter, where storms are fairly frequent. Weather on Saturn appears to hum along placidly for years and then erupt violently. I'm excited we saw weather so spectacular on our watch."

At its most intense, the storm generated more than 10 lightning flashes per second, a release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Wednesday.

"We have been observing storms on Saturn for almost seven years, so tracking a storm so different from the others has put us at the edge of our seats," said Georg Fischer, a radio and plasma wave science team member at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz.

The storm is the biggest observed by spacecraft orbiting or flying by Saturn, NASA said, although the Hubble Space Telescope captured images in 1990 of an equally large storm.