Making a close pass by the north pole of the planet Saturn – roughly the same distance as the average distance between Earth and its moon – NASA’s Cassini space probe captures unprecedented images of a hurricane-like storm vortex at the planet’s pole. With a diameter nearly as wide as the continental United States, the north polar vortex reveals vertical relief of various cloud features for the first time, and spins rapidly at the center of a hexagonal cloud feature nearly twice as wide as Earth itself.
