From time to time, the Hubble Space Telescope takes observes the four gas giant planets in the Solar System in a ongoing survey of the outer planets’ weather systems. It took the last images of Jupiter in that series on 25 August. This video opens with a view of Jupiter in visible light. Then, a false-color UV view wipes across the planet, followed by a wipe back to visible light.
Video Credit: NASA
This animation takes the viewer on a simulated journey into Jupiter’s exotic high-altitude electrical storms. It was assembled from an image of from the Juno spacecraft and computer animation. The second video explains what we think causes these storms.
Video Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
I made a minor contribution to the L’Ralph instrument on Lucy. It’s a very long mission. I’ll be 85 when Lucy flies by Trojan L5 binary asteroid (617) Patroclus-Menoetius in 2033.
Video Credit: NASA
The Cassini spacecraft did a flyby of Jupiter on its way to Saturn. During that pass by the gas giant, it took this picture of the moon Io. The planet and the moon appear deceptively close in this image, but Io is orbiting 217,000 miles above the planet.
Image Credit: NASA
On 26 December, 2019, the Juno spacecraft’s orbit around Jupiter brought it near the north pole of the ninth-largest object in the solar system, the moon Ganymede. The spacecraft’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument took the first infrared images of the massive moon’s north pole.
Ganymede only moon in the solar system that is larger than the planet Mercury. It’s mostly water ice. It is also the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. On Earth, the magnetic field provides a pathway for plasma (charged particles from the Sun) to enter our atmosphere and create aurora. Ganymede has no atmosphere to impede the progress of those charged particle, so the surface at its poles is constantly being bombarded by plasma from Jupiter’s gigantic magnetosphere. The bombardment has a dramatic effect on Ganymede’s ice.
The ice near both poles of the moon is amorphous. This is cause by the impact of the plasma on the surface. That pounding prevents the ice from having a crystalline structure.
Image Credit: NASA/ JPL / SWRI / ASI / INAF
Video Credit: NASA
The Juno spacecraft took this image of Jupiter’s northern latitudes during a close approach 17 February, 2020. Two long, thin bands run through the center of the image from top to bottom. Juno has observed these streaks since its first close pass over Jupiter in 2016. They are layers of haze particles floating above the cloud. We’re unsure of what these hazes are made of, or how they form. (There are no known SUVs on Jupiter.) There’s been speculation that jet streams in the planet’s atmospher may influence the formation of the hazes.
Image Credit: NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS
image processing by Gerald Eichstädt
In Greek mythology Io was a priestess of Hera (Zeus’ wife) and a nymph who was seduced by Zeus. He changed her into a heifer to escape detection. Io is also the name of the innermost of the four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter. The most volcanic body in the Solar System, Io is 3,600 kilometers in diameter, about the size of planet Earth’s moon.
While cruising past Jupiter at the turn of the millennium, the Cassini spacecraft captured this view of Io with Jupiter as a backdrop–offering an impressive demonstration of the ruling planet’s relative size. (An astronomer from another star system would probably describe our solar system as having one main planet and assorted debris.) Although Io appears to be located just in front of the swirling Jovian clouds, Io is about 350,000 km above Jupiter’s cloud tops. That’s roughly the same as the distance between Earth and Moon. The Cassini spacecraft itself was about 10 million km from Jupiter when this picture was taken.
Image Credit: NASA
The Solar System can accurately described as the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted rubble. Indeed, Jupiter’s mass is more than twice that of all the remaining planets, moons, asteroid, comets, and leftovers.
This view of Jupiter’s southern hemisphere was stitched together from four images taken by the JunoCam on the Juno spacecraft on 17 February, 2020.
Image data: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS
Image processing by Kevin M. Gill, © CC
Video Credit: NASA
This map of Jupiter was assembled from images taken by Hubble. It’s a stretched-out map of the entire planet.
The Great Red Spot is the orange-colored oval on the left side of the image. This storm has a diameter slightly larger than the entire Earth’s. It appears more orange than red in this image, with a small core of deep-orange color at the center. Clouds moving toward the giant storm from right to left are darker than in earlier observations, and clouds to the south, which are moving toward the Great Red Spot from west to east, are whiter than in past studies. The Great Red Spot has been decreasing in size since the 19th Century. The weather changes on Jupiter, but on a vastly different time scale than here on Earth.
Red Spot Jr., a smaller storm than the Great Red Spot, has faded from red to white over the past couple of years. This storm is near the center of the map further south than its big cousin. Earth-based telescopes originally identified Red Spot Jr. as a white, oval-shaped storm created when three smaller ovals merged about 20 years ago. It turned red in 2005. Now, it has changed back to its original color.
Image Credit: NASA / STScI
This 3D model of Jupiter was computer-generated data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope 27 June, 2019. Jupiter was 644 million km from Earth.
Videos Credits: NASA / ESA / A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center) / M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) / M. Kornmesser
Video Credit: NASA
The Juno spacecraft captured this view of a dark vortex within a Jovian jet stream. This color-enhanced image was taken on 29, 2019, as the spacecraft conducted its 20th flyby of Jupiter.
Image Credits: NASA /JPL / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Seán Doran
Video Credit: NASA
This animation illustrates Jupiter’s magnetic field at a single moment in time. The Great Blue Spot, an-invisible-to-the-eye concentration of magnetic field near the equator, stands out as a particularly strong feature. The gray lines (called field lines) show the field’s direction in space, and the depth of the color on the planet’s surface corresponds to the strength of the magnetic field. Dark red and dark blue correspond to strong positive and strong negative fields, respectively).
Video Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
Jupiter has (at last count) 79 moons. The four Galilean moons make up over 99.9% of the mass of all of the planet’s satellites. The next largest moon Amalthea was discovered in 1892. It’s irregularly shaped, 250 × 146 × 128 km, and not much was know about until the Voyager 1 and 2 flyby of Jupiter in 1979 and the Gailieo order mission which did a close pass by the moon in 2002.
Image Credit: NASA
This sequence of images was taken on 29 October as the Juno spacecraft performed its 16th close flyby of Jupiter. Juno was between 18,400 and 51,000 km the planet’s cloud tops. A cloud in the shape of a dolphin appears to be swimming through the cloud bands along the South South Temperate Belt.
Image Credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech /SwRI / MSSS / Brian Swift / Seán Doran
Arthur Dent was unavailable for comment.
This image taken by the Juno spacecraft shows Jupiter’s moon Io rising over the planet’s
horizon. Io is larger than Earth’s Moon and is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.
Image Credit: NASA
This color-enhanced image was taken by the Juno spacecraft as it made its 16th close flyby of Jupiter. It was taken about 7,000 km above the cloud tops at a latitude around 40° N. The picture shows several bright-white “pop-up” clouds as well as an anticyclonic storm, known as a white oval.
Image Credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Seán Doran
The Juno spacecraft is in obit around Jupiter. Here’s simulation of what it’s view of Jupiter and the planet’s moon looked like yesterday afternoon.
The simulation was generated using an App called NASA Eye’s which can be downloaded here. The app isn’t limited to just following the Juno mission.
This isn’t your typical backyard telescope view of Jupiter and three of its moons (Io, Ganymede, and Callisto). It was taken by the long range camera aboard the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in August, 2017, when it was about 170 million km from Earth and roughly 670 million km from Jupiter.
OSIRIS-REx is now closing in on the asteroid Bennu and will land there later this year to collect a sample of its surface material. If the mission goes as planned, the spacecraft will return the sample to Earth in 2023.
Image Credit: NASA
This extraordinary view of Jupiter was captured the Juno spacecraft as it moved away form the planet after twelfth close flyby..
Seeing Jupiter from the this far south causes the Great Red Spot to appear as if it is in Jupter’s north. It isn’t, but this new perspective demonstrates how different our view is when we step off the Earth and discover the three-dimensional nature of the Universe.
Image Credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstäd / Seán Doran
