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optical properties of the flash. Saturnian lightning has interesting differences from lightning on Earth. While
Cassini has been observing, only one storm has been active at any one time, and all the storms have been at the same latitude, around 35 degrees south latitude. The storms turn on and off on a timescale of several months. The storm in this movie occurs at this same latitude even after the change of Saturnian seasons at equinox.
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miles) thick. The width of the lightning spot at the top of the cloud is proportional to the depth where the flash originated. The observed widths indicate that the lightning is originating either in the hydrogen-sulfide-ammonia cloud or in the water ice cloud. The lightning does not appear to originate at the deepest levels of the cloud system, where water is liquid.
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The cloud, whose longest dimension is about 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles), does not change perceptibly over the 16 minutes of observations covered by the 10-second movie. The lightning flashes are the bright spots within the cloud, and are about 300 kilometers in diameter. The lightning strikes last
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The
Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini
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The sound track (movie with audio) gives synthetic lightning sounds at the times the radio signals from the lightning were recorded by the RPWS instrument. The radio signals themselves are at frequencies above the range detectable by the human ear, so the sound of thunder would not be appropriate.
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The ISS instrument saw lightning for the first time during the August 2009 northern spring equinox. The RPWS instrument has been detecting lightning at radio wavelengths since
Cassini's arrival at Saturn in 2004. Now, seeing the lightning allows scientists to pinpoint its location and measure the
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The movie uses data from two
Cassini instruments: the visible light cameras of the imaging science subsystem (ISS) and the radio and plasma wave science (RPWS) instrument. The movie compresses 16 minutes of narrow-angle-camera ISS images down to 10 seconds. The images show the storm cloud and its
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At Saturn, there are three types of clouds that might produce lightning. The top layer is made of ammonia ice; the middle layer is made of a compound of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia; the bottom layer is water. The light has to diffuse up through this cloud system, which is over 100 kilometers (60
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This movie is a concatenation of nine images taken in visible light with the
Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 30, 2009. This view is centered on terrain at about 35 degrees south latitude, 45 degrees west longitude. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.6 million
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orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space
Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. The radio and plasma wave team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
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This image from NASA's
Cassini spacecraft -- the first of its kind -- shows lightning on Saturn's night side flashing in a cloud that is illuminated by light from Saturn's rings.
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Both the ISS team and RPWS team have gaps in their observations during the 16 minutes the movie covers, so some radio signals do not have a flash to go with them and vice versa.
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surroundings, but changes in the shape of such a large cloud over such a short time are imperceptible. The lightning flashes appear as short bursts of light within the cloud.
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kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Saturn. The images were re-projected to a simple cylindrical map projection with a scale of 30 kilometers (19 miles) per pixel.
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Uploaded a work by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space
Science Institute/University of Iowa from https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12576 with UploadWizard
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joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use.
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The energy output of the visible light from the lightning is comparable to the brightest lightning flashes on Earth.
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The following pages on the
English Knowledge (XXG) use this file (pages on other projects are not listed):
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states that all of the images in the photo gallery are in the public domain "Unless otherwise noted."
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for short periods of time (less than one second before the time line of the movie was compressed).
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Included here is a three-by-three montage of nine frames showing some of the lightning flashes.
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The imaging team instead chose electrical spark sounds to represent the radio signals.
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data may be copyrighted if they are not explicitly produced by the
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For more information about the
Cassini-Huygens mission visit
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Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Additional terms may apply.
