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Sunday, October 12, 2014

NASA released the image strange hexagon on Saturn

Forget about the rings of Saturn. Another amazing feature that can be clearly seen only exceptionally distant spacecraft is a whirlwind of strange hexagonal shape, which has been active for at least 30 years old. Cassini NASA's captured this spectacular picture of a jet stream of geometric shapes Saturn in July 2013 from a distance of approximately 973,000 kilometers from the planet.

Image, which was published by NASA this week, has a scale 58 kilometers per pixel and obtained in the direction of the illuminated segment of the rings at 33 degrees above the ring plane. 


Mysterious hexagonal cloud was seen during the mission on Voyager in the early 1980s. It was still there when Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 after a long journey from the Earth, which began in 1997. Length of this vortex is about 30 000 km and air currents reach speeds of approximately 322 km / h, according to NASA. On other planets, there are also air flows, but astronomers have not seen similar elsewhere. Scientists believe that the vortex has existed for so long, because Saturn is a gas giant and has no release, which could help to stop the storms.

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