NASA has revealed the result of its study on the superstorm that hit Saturn in 2010. Findings reveal that the ringed planet possesses water.

Evert 30 years or so, the planet is hit by a raging storm, which according to the Los Angeles Times, helps scientists uncover some of the "planet's hidden secrets." However, the most recent superstorm hit Saturn almost 10 years earlier than expected.

The storm came in December 2010 and lasted for seven months, until August 2011. Visible on the images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the storm grew from a small dot on the surface of Saturn to a giant spot that encircled the planet. The Christian Science Monitor noted that the head of the thunderstorm alone is bigger than Earth.

"The storm quickly grew to superstorm proportions, encircling the planet at about 30 degrees north latitude for an expanse of nearly 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers)," wrote NASA's official report.

Notably though, from this occurrence, scientists were able to discover that water ice was present in the planet - the first time such finding was discovered.

NASA's report notes that in a new paper published on the journal Icarus the storm revealed that water ice come from the among the deeper layers of Saturn.

LA Times notes that the scientists have always believed that Saturn's atmosphere is "stacked like a layer cake" - water vapor clouds at the bottom and pure ammonia at the top, with ammonia hydrosulfide clouds sandwiched in between. But this has been hard to prove because of the thick haze that envelopes Saturn. However, the storm's strong winds were able to cut through this thick haze and make the layers observable through Cassini.

"[The] team recently analyzed that data and discovered that cloud particles at the top of the storm were probably made of water ice, ammonia ice and a third substance that might be ammonium sulfide," wrote the news website.

"We think this huge thunderstorm is driving these cloud particles upward, sort of like a volcano bringing up material from the depths and making it visible from outside the atmosphere," Lawrence Sromovsky, research team leader from the University of Wisconsin. "The upper haze is so optically thick that it is only in the stormy regions where the haze is penetrated by powerful updrafts that you can see evidence for the ammonia ice and the water ice. Those storm particles have an infrared color signature that is very different from the haze particles in the surrounding atmosphere."

The Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting the planet Saturn since 2004.