News Flash: Cassini Captures First Movie of Lightning on Saturn

By Nancy Atkinson - April 14, 2010 at 10:55 AM UTC | uncategorized

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured images of lightning on Saturn, allowing the scientists to create the first movie showing lightning flashing on another planet. "Ever since the beginning of the Cassini mission, a major goal of the Imaging Team has been the detection of Saturnian lightning," said team leader Carolyn Porco in an email. Porco said the ability to capture the lightning was a direct result of the dimming of the ringshine on the night side of the planet during last year's Saturn equinox. "And these flashes have been shown to be coincident in time with the emission of powerful electrostatic discharges intercepted by the Cassini Radio and Plasma Wave experiment," Porco added.

The sound in the video approximates the electrostatic discharge signals detected by the instrument.

"The process of electrostatic discharge and lightning production is tied to the motions of electrically charged particles and molecules in the Earth's atmosphere," Porco said, "and the same is believed to be true for the atmospheres of the giant planets. Measuring the power of lightning strikes in a planetary atmosphere can tell of the energy contained in the thunderstorms that spawn them and of the vigor of the atmospheric motions."

The movie and radio data suggest extremely powerful storms with lightning that flashes as brightly as the brightest super-bolts on Earth, according to Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging science subsystem team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "What's interesting is that the storms are as powerful -- or even more powerful -- at Saturn as on Earth," said Ingersoll. "But they occur much less frequently, with usually only one happening on the planet at any given time, though it can last for months."

The first images of the lightning were captured in August 2009, during a storm that churned from January to October 2009 and lasted longer than any other observed lightning storm in the solar system. Results are described in an article accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The data collected in order to make a video came in November through mid-December 2009 during a shorter storm that included brighter lightning and stronger radio signals. The frames in the video were obtained over 16 minutes on Nov. 30, 2009. The flashes lasted less than one second. The images show a cloud as long as 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) across and regions illuminated by lightning flashes about 300 kilometers (190 miles) in diameter. Scientists use the width of the flashes to gauge the depth of the lightning below the cloud tops.

For more images of the event, visit, the

CICLOPS site,

or see

this JPL press release.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com