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My name is Brigette Hesman, and I'm a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard

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Space Flight Center and I study storms on Saturn. A Great White Spot is a

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massive storm system that erupts on Saturn about once every Saturn year.

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The Great White Spot that erupted in December, 2010 first presented itself as

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this fluffy white storm cloud that popped up in the northern hemisphere. The

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storm when it erupted sent large waves up into the stratosphere and we saw

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effects like an increased amount of ethylene, something we never expected to

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see. In the coming days, the winds on Saturn sheared the storm in both

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directions and it wrapped all the way across the planet. If you were to scale

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that to a storm system here on the Earth, what you would have is a storm system

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that covers all of North America but wraps around the entire planet. There would be

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no escaping this storm system and it would be lasting for a very long time.

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This Great White Spot happened to occur ten years before we expected it, which

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was very fortunate because we happened to have a spacecraft called Cassini in

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orbit around Saturn, and that spacecraft has a full suite of instrumentation that

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allows us to study this over all wavelength ranges. Some of the effects

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that we got to see in the infrared were these two bright beacons that started to

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shine right after the storm erupted in December. Those beacons at first showed

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temperature differences of about 20 Kelvin, which is reasonable for a storm.

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However, as time progressed we started to see even larger temperature changes. By

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May 2011 the two beacons had merged into one, and we saw a temperature change of

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over 80 Kelvin from the quiet conditions before the storm. So that would be like

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going from the depths of winter in Fairbanks, Alaska to the height of summer

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in the Mojave Desert, all in one storm system. Can you imagine what that would

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feel like sitting on your deck? We've never before been able to study a

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storm system of this magnitude in the infrared, so we are very fortunate at

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this time to have a spacecraft in orbit allowing us to make a historical record

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of this Great White Spot.

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Music

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Beep, Beep, Beep