Real images of what nasa discovered on Jupiter From what has been found at the "Great Red Spot"
to new views on one of the planet's moons, and more! Allow us to show you Real images of what
nasa discovered on Jupiter! (Roll intro)
It's not hard to see why so many people at NASA and beyond are interested in Jupiter.
It's the biggest planet in our solar system, it's a massive gas giant that has all sorts of unique
atmospheric content, and it has so many moons that any one of them could have major discoveries
lurking within and we wouldn't know it until we honestly did some hardcore search on them.
That's why we've tried to make passes at Jupiter in various ways over the years in order to
not just get pictures and footage and even audio clips of the planet,
but to get a better idea of how this planet works as a whole. Enter the Juno Probe. It launched in
2011 and ever since has been giving NASA and others all sorts of information about Jupiter.
Even now, a decade after its launch, it's still providing people with valuable data, such as with
some new discoveries it made very recently. For example, if you've ever really looked
at Jupiter, you'll notice the "Great Red Spot" that is there for all to
see. That has very much been a fascination of scientists all over, and as a result of that,
Juno was sent to study it when possible, and new data has revised what we think of it as.
The Great Red Spot was thought to be a storm shaped as a flat "pancake," according to
Scott Bolton, principal investigator of NASA's Juno mission and director of the
space science and engineering division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
"We knew it lasted a long time, but we didn't know how deep or how it really worked."
In February and July 2019, NASA's Juno spacecraft flew directly over the Great Red Spot,
which is about 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) wide, to figure out how deep the vortex extends
beneath the visible cloud tops. One of the scientists on the team had this to say:
"The precision required to get the Great Red Spot’s gravity during the July 2019 flyby is
staggering. Being able to complement the microwave radiometer’s finding on the depth gives us great
confidence that future gravity experiments at Jupiter will yield equally intriguing results."
Now, based on the data found, some new things can be said about it. A microwave radiometer on
Juno gave scientists a three-dimensional look at the planet. They discovered that the Great
Red Spot is between 124 miles (200 kilometers) and 311 miles (500 kilometers) deep, extending
much deeper into the gas giant than expected. "The Great Red Spot is as deep within Jupiter
as the International Space Station is high above our heads," said Marzia Parisi, research
scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory noted in a press conference.
While the storm rages on, the size of the spot is shrinking. In 1979, it was twice Earth's diameter.
Since then, the spot has shrunk by at least a third. Leaving many to wonder what will happen as
time goes on. Will it continue to shrink? Will it suddenly grow back up in size? It's hard to say.
But what we do know is that Juno will be keeping an eye on it and giving updates whenever it can.
And that's not the only thing it's been looking at with the planet.
Five years ago, scientists used data gathered by Juno to capture photos and learn more
about Jupiter's poles. Juno found the gas giant has five cyclonic storms at the south pole in
the shape of a pentagon and eight cyclonic storms at the north pole forming an octagon.
But here's where the really trippy stuff comes in.
Because the storms aren't moving. They're literally rooted in place.
The polar cyclones showed patterns of trying to move toward the poles, but the cyclones on top
of each pole pushed back. This explains why the storms have remained in the same place.
That's definitely not the kind of storms you'd expect to see on a planet,
ones that literally push against one another and thus keep themselves locked in place.
Plus, the amount of storms near the poles indicate a lot as well. Further showing that we need to
study what is going on at the poles and how it's affecting the rest of the planet as a whole.
Before we go on to show you what else Juno has found, be sure to like or dislike the video so
that we can continue to make the best content for you, the viewer! Also be sure to subscribe to the
channel! And now, back to Jupiter! Now let's focus on the atmosphere,
and specifically, the clouds that are up there in the atmosphere, because they might be exactly what
you think, nor interact in the way you expect. Jupiter's clouds are embedded in the east and
west jet streams, which extends 200 miles (322 kilometers) deep, said Keren Duer,
a doctoral student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. When the research team followed
the movement of ammonia, it revealed that it traveled in an up-and-down and north-south
movement surrounding the jet streams. What you might not realize is that
Earth has similar "cells" here. They're known as Ferrell Cells,
and they help guide the wind and other circulation patterns for our planet. This in turn goes and
helps regulate the climate of our planet in ways that help gives us a proper temperature output.
But with Jupiter, they are much larger, more numerous, and more impactful as a whole:
"This means that the cells on Jupiter are at least 30 times deeper than
the equivalent cells on Earth," Duer said. There's a lot to dive into just with that, not the
least of which is that the Juno probe is proving just how important it is to the study of Jupiter,
as it's able to look beyond what many can do here on Earth and provide much more detail in
regards to what is going on with the planet. Scott Bolton, the principal investigator
of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, said:
"Previously, Juno surprised us with hints that phenomena in Jupiter’s atmosphere went deeper
than expected. Now, we’re starting to put all these individual pieces together and getting
our first real understanding of how Jupiter’s beautiful and violent atmosphere works in 3D."
And to be clear, he really does mean violent, because the Great Red Spot
and the storms at the poles aren't the only things that Jupiter has going on.
Jupiter has both cyclones, which circulate clockwise, and anticyclones, which circulate
counterclockwise. Juno discovered that cyclones have warmer air and lower density at the top, with
cooler air and higher densities at the bottom. Anticyclones display the opposite characteristics,
with colder air on top of warmer air. So they truly are polar opposites of one another,
and that makes it all the more intriguing that Jupiter doesn't just happen, but they happen in
bulk, apparently. Another reason to keep going and studying Jupiter to see what we can figure out.
Sticking with what's going on in the atmosphere, let's talk about the Auroras that are on Jupiter.
Not surprisingly, they are very much like the ones that we have here on Earth.
With one major difference of course. That being that the ones on Jupiter are MUCH
more powerful than ours. How much more powerful? Well, the ones that we know about are said to be
so supercharged with power that they can go and powerful up all of humankind's cities for
a brief period of time. That's a lot of power. The mystery goes deeper than that though. Because
while we know that these Aurora form on the poles of the planet, scientists aren't exactly sure how
they're formed. they believe it's because of the atmospheric conditions of Jupiter and how
they release supercharged particles that eventually go and collide with one another
in order to create the aurora in question. There's definitely further study needed on
these entities, especially if they might tell us even more about our own planet's auroras
and how we can better examine them. But of course, it's not just the planet
itself that is worthy of study, it's the moons. We finally know what the north pole of Jupiter's
moon Europa looks like, from a distance at least. The image was taken from nearly
50,000 miles away while Juno was performing its primary mission to examine Jupiter's atmosphere.
The view will improve next year when the spacecraft zooms only a few hundred miles
above that same region, Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton revealed:
"This is a tantalizing example and a taste of what to come."
Europa is a popular destination that has been imaged by spacecraft many times.
The first close-up views were from NASA's twin Pioneer and twin Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s,
revealing an icy surface scarred by cracks. Even more detail came during the Galileo mission,
which orbited Jupiter and its moons between 1995 and 2003.
As you can see, the June probe has done a LOT for NASA scientists over the years. Which is why it
shouldn't be too surprising that they've extended the Juno Probe's mission to 2025. That's another
4 years or so of information on Jupiter that can do wonders for the scientific community.
But for some out there, they might not see the point in this. Why should we go and study
Jupiter to this degree? Why do we care about the Great Red Spot, or these anticyclones,
or what the north pole of one of their moons looks like? Why should we care about that at all?
The answer is that the more information we have about the planet, the more we can see what we can
do with it in the future. The goal for humanity for a long time is to go and explore the stars and
colonize other worlds and moons. And while Jupiter itself may not be a hospitable place for people to
go and live as it doesn't have a ground as far as we can tell, it does have plenty of moons. Many
of which have been deemed viable candidates for us to potentially land on. But, given
that we'd be still very close to Jupiter. it's important that know about what the planet is like,
what it's truly made of, and how its fields and atmosphere affect the nearby moons. Because if
we don't know those basic things, we're going to be in serious trouble, and who wants that?
Just as important though is the fact that the more we study this gas giant, the more we're likely
to have an understanding of future gas giants not just in our solar system, but in ones that we look
at in space. Knowing what we have close to us is vital as we expand our gaze and reach and locate
other gas giants. Because that means we'll have a basis of what we think is out there, and then can
alter and fine tune our thoughts as we go on. Plus, it's fun! The Juno Probe is literally
being our eyes and ears out in space and if it wasn't for that probe, we wouldn't
know half or even a quarter about Jupiter as we do now. So why go and continue studying
Jupiter? The better question is, why not? Thanks for watching, everyone! What did you
think of this look at Jupiter and all the recent things that the Juno probe went and discovered
there? Do you think that these discoveries will indeed help us learn more about the biggest
planet in our solar system? Do you think that there is even more still to be discovered and
uncovered there? Let us know in the comments below, and we'll see you next time on the channel!