We’re About to Get Our Closest Look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

We’re About to Get Our Closest Look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

We’re About to Get Our Closest Look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot:

When the Juno mission reached Jupiter on July 5th, 2016, it became the second mission in history to establish orbit around the Solar System’s largest planet. And in the course of it conducting its many orbits, it has revealed some interesting things about Jupiter. This has included information about its atmosphere, meteorological phenomena, gravity, and its powerful magnetic fields.

And just yesterday – on Monday, July 10th at 7:06 p.m. PDT (11:06 p.m. EDT) – just days after the probe celebrated its first year of orbiting the planet, the Juno mission passed directly over Jupiter’s most famous feature – the Great Red Spot. This massive anticyclonic storm has been a focal point for centuries, and Juno’s scheduled flyby was the closest any mission has ever come to it.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was first observed during the late 17th century, either by Robert Hooke or Giovanni Cassini. By 1830, astronomers began monitoring this anticyclonic storm, and have noted periodic expansions and regressions in its size ever since. Today, it is 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles) in diameter and reaches wind speeds of 120 meters per second (432 km/h; 286 mph) at the edges.

The Juno spacecraft isn’t the first one to visit Jupiter. Galileo went there in the mid 90’s, and Voyager 1 snapped a nice picture of the clouds on its mission. Credit: NASA

As part of its sixth orbit of Jupiter’s turbulent cloud tops, Juno passed close to Jupiter’s center (aka. perijove), which took place at 6:55 p.m. PDT (9:55 p.m. EDT). Eleven minutes later – at 7:06 p.m. PDT (10:06 p.m. EDT) – the probe flew over the Great Red Spot. In the process, Juno was at a distance of just 9,000 km (5,600 miles) from the anticyclonic storm, which is the closest any spacecraft has ever flown to it.

During the flyby, Juno had all eight of its scientific instruments (as well its imager, the JunoCam) trained directly on the storm. With such an array aimed at this feature, NASA expects to learn more about what has been powering this storm for at least the past three and a half centuries. As Scott Bolton, the principal investigator of Juno at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), said prior to the event in a NASA press release:

“Jupiter’s mysterious Great Red Spot is probably the best-known feature of Jupiter. This monumental storm has raged on the Solar System’s biggest planet for centuries. Now, Juno and her cloud-penetrating science instruments will dive in to see how deep the roots of this storm go, and help us understand how this giant storm works and what makes it so special.”

This perijove and flyby of the Giant Red Spot also comes just days after Juno celebrated its first anniversary around Jupiter. This took place on July 4th at 7:30 p.m. PDT (10:30 p.m. EDT), at which point, Juno had been in orbit around the Jovian planet for exactly one year. By this time, the spacecraft had covered a distance of 114.5 million km (71 million mi) while orbiting around the planet.

This artist’s illustration shows Juno’s Microwave Radiometer observing deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The image shows real data from the 6 MWR channels, arranged by wavelength. Credit: NASA/SwRI/JPL

The information that Juno has collected in that time with its advanced suite of instruments has already provided fresh insights into Jupiter’s interior and the history of its formation. And this information, it is hoped, will help astronomers to learn more about the Solar System’s own history of formation. And in the course of making its orbits, the probe has been put through its paces, absorbing radiation from Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field.

As Rick Nybakken, the project manager for Juno at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, put it:

“The success of science collection at Jupiter is a testament to the dedication, creativity and technical abilities of the NASA-Juno team. Each new orbit brings us closer to the heart of Jupiter’s radiation belt, but so far the spacecraft has weathered the storm of electrons surrounding Jupiter better than we could have ever imagined.”

The Juno mission is set to conclude this coming February, after completing 6 more orbits of Jupiter. At this point, and barring any mission extensions, the probe will be de-orbited to burn up in Jupiter’s outer atmosphere. As with the Galileo spacecraft, this is meant to avoid any possibility of impact and biological contamination with one of Jupiter’s moons.

Further Reading: NASA

The post We’re About to Get Our Closest Look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot appeared first on Universe Today.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

UFO SIGHTINGS PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

UFO PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Wednesday, July 12, 2017