More about Jim Bridenstine. More about Eric De Jong Learn something about the field you are interested in, whether by reading a book, taking a course, joining a club, etc. Exploring your interests will help you find your career path.
More about Emily Manor-Chapman. They require as much discipline as an athlete working to be a football player, or a musician attempting to land a recording contract. More about Claudia Alexander Charles Charlie F. Hall, managed of several of NASA's most daring and exciting early scientific space missions.
More about Charles Hall - Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. More about Carl Sagan More about Bruce Murray More about Ashwin Vasavada. I study volcanoes—how they erupt, and why—and what they tell us about the interior not only of the Earth, but other planets and satellites across the solar system.
More about Albert "Joey" Jefferson. More about Al Hibbs I love exploring and living life like it is a grand adventure. Meet a rover camera operator. Explore in 3D—Eyes on the Solar System Eyes on the Solar System lets you explore the planets, their moons, asteroids, comets and the spacecraft exploring them from to In , on its way to Jupiter, Galileo observed the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with the planet.
The mission ended with the spacecraft deliberately plunging into Jupiter's atmosphere in September to avoid contamination of the Galilean moons.
En route to its operational orbit around the Sun, it arrived at Jupiter in February , where it made a swing-by manoeuvre to adjust its orbit. The spacecraft used Jupiter for another gravity-assist manoeuvre in During both of these fleeting journeys through the Jovian system, Ulysses measured the planet's magnetosphere. It made the closest approach to Jupiter in December , collecting about 26 images of the planet and discovering its atmospheric circulation.
The inbound and outbound trajectories allowed scientists to observe the planet daytime and nighttime, and coordinated observations with Earth-orbiting spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope and with the Galileo spacecraft already in orbit around Jupiter provided a rich science harvest.
Cassini-Huygens continued on to Saturn where it arrived in , deployed the Huygens probe to land on Titan in January , and then spent 13 years undertaking an extensive exploration of the Saturnian system, the rings and satellites, before the mission ended in September During its time in the Jovian system the mission captured stunning photos of the gas giant revealing a dynamic planet that had changed since previous mission visits.
Among the treasures returned were a nighttime view of auroras, the detection of lightning near the planet's poles, and discovery of clumps of material in the main ring of the planet, studies of Jupiter's weather layer, an erupting volcano on Io, and ice maps of Europe and Ganymede. However, any spacecraft, no matter how robust, would not survive for long in Jupiter, so the Lunar Lander is as good of a choice as any for this hypothetical scenario.
First things first, Jupiter's atmosphere has no oxygen. So make sure you bring plenty with you to breathe. The next problem is the scorching temperatures. So pack an air conditioner. Now, you're ready for a journey of epic proportions. For scale, here's how many Earths you could stack from Jupiter's center.
As you enter the top of the atmosphere, you're be traveling at , mph under the pull of Jupiter's gravity. But brace yourself. You'll quickly hit the denser atmosphere below, which will hit you like a wall.
It won't be enough to stop you, though. After about 3 minutes you'll reach the cloud tops miles down. Here, you'll experience the full brunt of Jupiter's rotation. Jupiter is the fastest rotating planet in our solar system. One day lasts about 9. This creates powerful winds that can whip around the planet at more than mph. About 75 miles below the clouds, you reach the limit of human exploration. This gives Jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system — an ocean made of hydrogen instead of water.
Scientists think that, at depths perhaps halfway to the planet's center, the pressure becomes so great that electrons are squeezed off the hydrogen atoms, making the liquid electrically conducting like metal. Jupiter's fast rotation is thought to drive electrical currents in this region, generating the planet's powerful magnetic field. It is still unclear if deeper down, Jupiter has a central core of solid material or if it may be a thick, super-hot and dense soup.
It could be up to 90, degrees Fahrenheit 50, degrees Celsius down there, made mostly of iron and silicate minerals similar to quartz. The planet is mostly swirling gases and liquids. The extreme pressures and temperatures deep inside the planet crush, melt, and vaporize spacecraft trying to fly into the planet.
Jupiter's appearance is a tapestry of colorful cloud bands and spots. The gas planet likely has three distinct cloud layers in its "skies" that, taken together, span about 44 miles 71 kilometers. The top cloud is probably made of ammonia ice, while the middle layer is likely made of ammonium hydrosulfide crystals.
The innermost layer may be made of water ice and vapor. The vivid colors you see in thick bands across Jupiter may be plumes of sulfur and phosphorus-containing gases rising from the planet's warmer interior. Jupiter's fast rotation — spinning once every 10 hours — creates strong jet streams, separating its clouds into dark belts and bright zones across long stretches. With no solid surface to slow them down, Jupiter's spots can persist for many years.
Stormy Jupiter is swept by over a dozen prevailing winds, some reaching up to miles per hour kilometers per hour at the equator. The Great Red Spot, a swirling oval of clouds twice as wide as Earth, has been observed on the giant planet for more than years.
More recently, three smaller ovals merged to form the Little Red Spot, about half the size of its larger cousin. Anticyclones, which rotate in the opposite direction, are colder at the top but warmer at the bottom. The findings also indicate these storms are far taller than expected, with some extending 60 miles kilometers below the cloud tops and others, including the Great Red Spot, extending over miles kilometers. This surprising discovery demonstrates that the vortices cover regions beyond those where water condenses and clouds form, below the depth where sunlight warms the atmosphere.
With their gravity data, the Juno team was able to constrain the extent of the Great Red Spot to a depth of about miles kilometers below the cloud tops. Belts and Zones In addition to cyclones and anticyclones, Jupiter is known for its distinctive belts and zones — white and reddish bands of clouds that wrap around the planet.
Strong east-west winds moving in opposite directions separate the bands.
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