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At the same time that temperatures within the storm were flying off the handle, researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center were detecting an unprecedented spike in ethylene. According to NASA, the odorless, colorless gas is typically barely detectable on Saturn; in fact, according to Hesman, ethylene concentrations during the storm reached concentrations 100 times greater than scientists had previously believed possible for the ringed planet.

What really stands out about these observations — apart from the unprecedented nature of the findings themselves — is that we were able to make them in the first place. Planetary scientists predict that this type of storm pops up on Saturn around once every thirty Earth-years. This storm actually came around a few years earlier than expected, but the point is this: the last time a storm like this cropped up, we had no spacecraft in place to watch it unfold. What's more, with Cassini scheduled to plunge into Saturn in just five years, and no spacecraft scheduled to take its place, there are currently no plans to have another spacecraft whipping around the Saturnian system when the next planet-wide storm unfolds.

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Cassini is a champion, and consistently delivers not just beautiful images of some of the most photogenic astronomical bodies in our solar system, but damn good science. We owe it to ourselves to keep spacecraft like Cassini — and more of them — out there exploring our solar neighborhood.

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The spikes in temperature and ethylene concentrations are described in a paper to be published in the November 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
[NASA]