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| Juno is carrying a color camera to give the public its first detailed look at Jupiter’s poles. This distant image was captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which visited the giant planet in 2000 on its way to Saturn. |
First,
you could stuff 1,000 earths inside Jupiter and that wouldn’t be a problem
because there is no land under those clouds. No land no real estate agents.
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| JUPITER from HUBBELL telescope. |
So,
what is Jupiter made of:
Jupiter
is primarily composed of hydrogen (89.8%) with a quarter of its mass being
helium (10.2%), though helium comprises only about a tenth of the number of
molecules. It may also have a rocky core of heavier elements, but like the
other giant planets (Saturn, Neptune and Uranus), Jupiter lacks a well-defined
solid surface.
Because
of its rapid 29,000 mph planetary rotation speed, Jupiter’s shape that of an
oblate spheroid (it has a slight but noticeable bulge around the equator). Being the fifth planet,
Jupiter’s
takes 11.86 earth years to complete one orbit around our sun.
The
outer atmosphere is visibly segregated into several bands at different
latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting
boundaries. A prominent result is the Great Red Spot (larger than earth), a
giant storm that is known to have existed since at least the 17th century when
it was first seen by telescope.
Surrounding
Jupiter is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. Jupiter
has at least 67 moons, including the four large Galilean moons discovered by
Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede, the largest of these, has a diameter greater
than that of the planet Mercury.
One
of the goals of the Juno mission is to learn more about Jupiter’s core as there
is doubt if one actually exists.
The
following is NASA’s description of Juno’s goals:
The
primary scientific goal of the Juno mission is to significantly improve our
understanding of the formation, evolution and structure of Jupiter. Concealed
beneath a dense cover of clouds, Jupiter, the archetypical "Giant
Planet," safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes underlying the
early formation of our solar system.
Present
theories of the origin and early evolution of our solar system are currently at
an impasse. Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about
Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present
theories about the early formation of our own solar system.
Juno
- View from Cassini of Jupiter's North Poles
Juno
is carrying a color camera to give the public its first detailed look at
Jupiter’s poles. This distant image was captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft,
which visited the giant planet in 2000 on its way to Saturn.
Now,
the spinning, solar-powered Juno
spacecraft is in a highly elliptical polar orbit that skims only 5000
kilometers above the planet's atmosphere.
Building
on the results of previous fly-by missions, Juno will provide new information
to help us determine how, when and where this giant planet formed. Answering
these questions for Jupiter is essential for an understanding of the origin of
the solar system itself because Jupiter contains more mass than all the other
planets combined.
Juno
will seek these answers with instruments that can sense the hidden world
beneath Jupiter's colorful clouds while other experiments investigate the
external effects that world produces.
Jupiter
has no solid surface. Instead its hydrogen and helium dominated atmosphere
grows steadily denser with depth. Ultimately, but we don't know exactly where,
the atmosphere must become a fluid in which hydrogen acts like an electrically
conducting metal. Still deeper there may be a core of heavy elements and
somewhere, somehow, an intense magnetic field is generated.
The
invisible external tendrils of that field guide charged particles that crash
into the polar ionospheres, producing the most intense auroras (the northern
and southern "lights") in the solar system. Juno will study these and
other characteristics that make Jupiter one of the most fascinating planets in
the solar system.
To
answer our fundamental questions about origins we especially need to know
Jupiter's internal structure and global water abundance. Juno will map the
internal structure by studying its influence on the planet's gravitational
field with unprecedented accuracy. The water abundance will be determined by
microwave radiometers that will detect thermal radiation from deep atmospheric
layers, a completely new approach. Water ice brought most of the heavy elements
to Jupiter. Knowing the water abundance will tell us the original form of that
ice and hence help define the conditions and processes in the original cloud of
dust and gas that led to the origin of Jupiter. Those same conditions and
processes were forming other planets too. Because this enormous planet contains
most of the water in the solar system we can expect this investigation to help
us understand the origin of the life-giving water on Earth.
The
launch of the Juno mission in August 2011 began a five-year journey to Jupiter,
to investigate the remaining unanswered questions beneath the surface of the
mysterious gas giant.
Two informative
YouTube presentations on Jupiter:
Beautiful
HD presentation by NASA of Hubbell space telescope images of the gas planet.
Jupiter
facts in an hour long science documentary
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