Money Matters, Simplified.
NASA's latest images detail Jupiter's Great Red Spot
by Ishita Sood - March 17, 2010 - comments
Discovered in 1610, Jupiter has been explored by Pioneer and Voyager, and recently, the new Horizons spacecraft in February 2007. The image above was captured by Voyager 1 in 1979.
NASA’s latest discovery gives the first detailed image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The space agency says it is a never seen before image of the planet’s familiar sight.
“This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system,” said Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated.”
The images were obtained by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile along with the Gemini Observatory telescope (Chile) and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru telescope (Hawaii).
The Great Red Spot
The Great Red Spot, which covers the cold region of the planet, is three times as wide as the Earth. It was initially spotted in the late 17th century by astronomers.
“If you’d seen it back then, though, you might have been “tempted to call it the great red sausage. It’s shrinking slowly,” said Orton.
Known as the giant planet, and fifth in the solar system, Jupiter has an average temperature of minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit.
“This is the first time we can say that there’s an intimate link between environmental conditions — temperature, winds, pressure and composition — and the actual color of the Great Red Spot,” said Orton’s collaborator, Leigh Fletcher, from Oxford’s University Department of Physics.
“Although we can speculate, we still don’t know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red color, but we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm,” Fletcher added.
He also said that the red spot of Jupiter is by far the most intriguing part.
The new data also throws light on circulation patterns within the solar system. Many parts of the planet have different temperatures, which alter wind velocities and affect cloud patterns. The research appears in the journal ‘Icarus.’
More on the giant planet
Known as the giant planet, and fifth in the solar system, Jupiter has an average temperature of minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit.
It has been often associated with mythology since the times of Romans as they named it after their god Jupiter.
Jupiter is an oblate spheroid by shape having planetary rings and a powerful magnetosphere.
Discovered in 1610 by Galileo, Jupiter has been explored by Pioneer and Voyager in the 1980s, and recently, by the New Horizons spacecraft in Feb. 2007.
It has often been called the Solar System's vacuum cleaner as it has enormous gravity.