December, 2010:

While planet Earth experienced repeated storm attacks, Saturn was often experienced a storm that many times more horrible. For example, the appearance of the Great White Spot, a spot that is often seen on Saturn.

From observations conducted by the satellite Cassini at Saturn, it turns out, the Great White Spot is a gigantic storm, measuring up to thousands of kilometers, crossing through the south area of the planet.

Great White Spot is a similar phenomena such as the Great Red Spot that is happening on the planet Jupiter.

On Saturn, a giant storm that comes once every approximately 28.5 years. Earlier, the storm was present in 1876, 1903, 1933, 1960, and 1990. That is, the next storm are estimated to be present in the coming year 2018.

Even so, there is also a storm that sometimes appears outside the regular cycle of storms, for example, in 1994 and 2006. As quoted from MSN, December 29, 2010, on Christmas Eve then, Cassini returned to find the emergence of a storm on Saturn.

“Storms like this is expected to arise due to temperature instability threw tons of material from below the planet’s atmosphere into the upper atmosphere,” said Carolyn Porco, a researcher of the Space Science Institute. “When this storm is tangent to the routine storm cycle every 28 years, it became so gigantic as to be circling the entire planet,” he said.

Like now, Porco said, the camera on Cassini caught a giant storm that is present in the north are of Saturn. “Technically, we do not know whether this storm will develop into the Great White Spot,” said Porco.

“However, though not gained a reputation for ‘great’ storm that occurred on this Saturn which dozens of times larger than the present storm on Earth,” he said.