A hexagon on the ringed planet
By Ron Cowen
Something has put the hex on Saturn. NASA scientists are puzzled by a giant, hexagon-shaped feature that hovers above Saturn’s entire north pole. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft first spotted the hexagon more than 2 decades ago. New infrared images taken by the Cassini spacecraft show that the feature has persisted and that a second, darker hexagon surrounds the brighter, previously recorded one.
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“We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet,” says Cassini scientist Kevin Baines of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Saturn’s thick, swirling atmosphere, with its circular-flow patterns, wouldn’t seem the place to find a nearly perfect six-sided figure, he notes. Indeed, the north pole hexagon contrasts sharply with a hurricane raging at Saturn’s south pole and resembling a giant eye.
The winds within the hexagon may be similar to Earth’s polar vortices, which occur intermittently as winds blow in circles around the poles. However, with a diameter of nearly 25,000 kilometers, the hexagon could fit about four Earths inside it. NASA released the images on March 27.