Monster Storm Reveals Water On Saturn

cold fjord sends this news from NASA: "A monster storm that erupted on Saturn in late 2010 – as large as any storm ever observed on the ringed planet -- has already impressed researchers with its intensity and long-lived turbulence. A new paper in the journal Icarus reveals another facet of the storm's explosive power: its ability to churn up water ice from great depths. This finding, derived from near-infrared measurements by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, is the first detection at Saturn of water ice. The water originates from deep in Saturn's atmosphere. 'The new finding from Cassini shows that Saturn can dredge up material from more than 100 miles [160 kilometers],' said Kevin Baines, a co-author of the paper who works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 'It demonstrates in a very real sense that typically demure-looking Saturn can be just as explosive or even more so than typically stormy Jupiter.'"

Water? Oh, good!

[ackthpt]

That means we can land there and live and farm and ... be magnetized by the hugely dense magnetic field. Oof.

no subsidy for you!

Re:

[LandDolphin]

Hmm.. We can become Magneto?

Re:Water? Oh, good!

[rossdee]

What, exactly are we going to land on?

theres no liquid or solid surface, at least for a long way down where the pressure is so high that even a bathysphere that could dive to the deepest part of earths ocean would be crushed
we'd be better off exploring and colonizing the moons and rings

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[DaveV1.0]

The ICE, duh! Didn't your RTFA? Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.

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[sir-gold]

Just because there is ice, it doesn't mean that the ice is actually sitting ON something. It could be more like a perpetual hail storm, where the ice is being constantly lifted and dropped by the storm

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[DaveV1.0]

The humor, you missed it.

Re:Water? Oh, good!

[drkim]

The ICE, duh! Didn't your RTFA? Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.

The gas-liquid-solid gets thicker and thicker as you go down. The pressure gets so great that the hydrogen molecules get their electrons squeezed out of them, which means that the hydrogen becomes a sea of freezing liquid metal.

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[Brandano]

Gas giant, so I guess not. Perhaps we could float on its outer edge and mine for tibanna gas.

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[The Grim Reefer]

My good people you look like 3 year olds interpreting the meaning of words: a gas giant can have many other things besides gas, like, uhmm I don't know: a solid planet can have many other things other than solids? (Hint: Breath).

I can't say I've heard of a "solid planet". I have heard of rocky planets with an atmosphere though. Just what do you plan to land on, on Saturn? I suppose you could get lucky and find something being tossed around in the atmosphere, but good luck with that. You sure as hell aren't going to land on anything solid like a core. The last I checked it is probably metallic hydrogen surrounded by liquid hydrogen. It's unlikely we will ever have the technology to build anything that can reach that and remain intac

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[sir-gold]

There is a sci-fi book called "The Clouds of Saturn," by Michael McCollum, where everyone lives in massive airships filled with superheated hydrogen (basically the same idea as a hot-air ballon, but much much bigger)

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[oodaloop]

It's more like social media site Facebook [wondermark.com]

Re:Water Ice?

[Brandano]

Actually, talking about planets the term "ice" is often used to describe the solid form of other substances, most commonly frozen CO2. and even in the case of water, the common everyday ice is only one of two possible solid states for water. I presume the high pressure, tightly packed and heavier than (liquid) water solid form isprobably called "heavy ice"?

Re:Water Ice?

[khellendros1984]

I presume the high pressure, tightly packed and heavier than (liquid) water solid form isprobably called "heavy ice"?

There are 15 known [wikipedia.org] solid phases of water. They're called things like Ice-III.

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[washort]

Ice-IX is less exciting than one might hope.

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[geekoid]

*Applaud*

Some storm...

[edrobinson]

but I'm not convinced that the IR image shows either water ice or ammonia.

100 miles??

[Anonymous Coward]

'The new finding from Cassini shows that Saturn can dredge up material from more than 100 miles [160 kilometers],'
doesn't this seem like a really unremarkable measurement considering the size of Saturn. In comparison it would be like finding out a storm on earth had had an effect on the atmosphere 10 km above it...unless i'm getting the scale/impact wrong it seems like a completely underwhelming scale.

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[ganjadude]

Are you forgetting that this is also many many millions and millions of miles away and something we never have seen before? and did i mention its millions of miles away??

Expecting gas and got something solid?

[atouk]

I guess it's true, even for the Gods. Never trust a fart.

Exclusive ownership

[Trax3001BBS]

The book "The Hubble Wars" mentions all material one gets from using the Hubble can be held for a year before being released.
(So they can find the next big thing and not some computer geek using Photoshop, abbreviated term: /.'er)

This event is two/three years old, Guess different craft, different contracts for release.

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[darenw]

Yup. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer explained it well. What goes for Hubble, goes pretty much the same for Cassini (I know, I worked for CICLOPS) and for many other planetary missions.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/badhst.html [badastronomy.com]

Lets not go there

[future assassin]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/ [imdb.com]

Not a fair comparison

[fustakrakich]

We don't have much orbiting Jupiter taking nice closeups right now.

Water on Saturn?

[ArcadeMan]

I'm not quite shocked [staticflickr.com].