A deep, hexagon-shaped feature lies above Saturn's north pole, newly released images from the Cassini spacecraft reveal. The strange structure appears to be nearly stationary and may be a wave that stretches deep into the giant planet's atmosphere.
NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft glimpsed parts of the feature nearly 30 years ago, but because of their viewing angle, they were not able to see the whole thing. Now, Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer has captured the entire hexagon for the first time, thanks to a series of infrared images it took as the spacecraft flew over the pole in October and November 2006 (see Cassini snaps Saturn from a dizzying height).
The hexagon spans nearly 25,000 kilometres – the width of two Earths – and appears to be a clearing in the clouds that extends at least 75 km below the planet's visible cloudtops. Watch a movie of clouds whipping around Saturn's strange hexagon (4.2 MB, gif).
"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," says team member Kevin Baines of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet"...
--New Scientist Space
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