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NASA’s Billion-Dollar Space Probe Sends Back Stunning New Images of Jupiter

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Here Is What Would Happen If Humans Tried To Land On Jupiter

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A special thanks to Kunio Sayanagi at Hampton University, for his help with this video. The best way to explore a new world is to land on it. That's why humans have sent spacecraft to the Moon, Venus, Mars, Saturn's moon, Titan, and more. But there are a few places in the solar system we will never understand as well as we'd like. One of them is Jupiter.

Jupiter is made of mostly hydrogen and helium gas. So, trying to land on it would be like trying to land on a cloud here on Earth. There's no outer crust to break your fall on Jupiter. Just an endless stretch of atmosphere.

The big question, then, is: Could you fall through one end of Jupiter and out the other? It turns out, you wouldn't even make it halfway. Here's what would happen if you tried to land on Jupiter.

*It's important to note that we feature the Lunar Lander for the first half of the descent. In reality, the Lunar Lander is relatively delicate compared to, say, NASA's Orion spacecraft. Therefore, the Lunar Lander would not be used for a mission to land on any world that contains an atmosphere, including Jupiter. 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 110,000 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 155 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 9.5 Earth hours. This creates powerful winds that can whip around the planet at more than 300 mph.

About 75 miles below the clouds, you reach the limit of human exploration. The Galileo probe made it this far when it dove into Jupiter's atmosphere in 1995. It only lasted 58 minutes before losing contact and was eventually destroyed by the crushing pressures.

Down here, the pressure is nearly 100 times what it is at Earth's surface. And you won't be able to see anything, so you'll have to rely on instruments to explore your surroundings. By 430 miles down, the pressure is 1,150 times higher. You might survive down here if you were in a spacecraft built like the Trieste submarine — the deepest diving submarine on Earth. Any deeper and the pressure and temperature will be too great for a spacecraft to endure.

However, let's say you could find a way to descend even farther. You will uncover some of Jupiter's grandest mysteries.But, sadly, you'll have no way to tell anyone. Jupiter's deep atmosphere absorbs radio waves, so you'll be shut off from the outside world— unable to communicate.

Once you've reached 2,500 miles down, the temperature is 6,100 ºF. That's hot enough to melt tungsten, the metal with the highest melting point in the Universe. At this point, you will have been falling for at least 12 hours. And you won't even be halfway through.

At 13,000 miles down, you reach Jupiter's innermost layer. Here the pressure is 2 million times stronger than at Earth's surface. And the temperature is hotter than the surface of the sun. These conditions are so extreme they change the chemistry of the hydrogen around you.

Hydrogen molecules are forced so close together that their electrons break lose, forming an unusual substance called metallic hydrogen. Metallic hydrogen is highly reflective. So, if you tried using lights to see down here it would be impossible.

And it's as dense as a rock. So, as you travel deeper, the buoyancy force from the metallic hydrogen counteracts gravity's downward pull. Eventually, that buoyancy will shoot you back up until gravity pulls you back down, sort of like a yo-yo. And when those two forces equal, you'll be left free-floating in mid-Jupiter, unable to move up or down, and no way to escape!

Suffice it say, trying to land on Jupiter is a bad idea. We may never see what's beneath those majestic clouds. But we can still study and admire this mysterious planet from afar.

Astronomers Have Just Made A Fascinating Discovery On Jupiter

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An international team of researchers has discovered that the gas giant, the largest planet in the Solar System, also has austral auroras ( south ) and that, against all odds, they act independently of the northern ones ( Borealis ), according to a recent study published in Nature Astronomy. Researchers from ESA and NASA have discovered that unlike Earth’s polar lights, the intense auroras seen at Jupiter’s poles unexpectedly behave independently of one another. Jupiter’s northern auroras are erratic and “do not coincide in behavior, neither in intensity nor in frequency with those found on Jupiter’s southern pole”.

Auroras are planetary phenomena that take place when the wind of energetic particles of a star collides with the magnetic field of a planet (magnetosphere).

Using ESA’s XMM.Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-Ray space observatories, astronomers were able to observe high-energy X-Rays produced by the auroras on each of Jupiter’s poles.

Experts found that the southern auroras on Jupiter pulse every 11 minutes consistently, while those at the planet’s northern pole flared chaotically.

“These auroras don’t seem to act in unison like those that we’re often familiar with here on Earth,” says lead author William Dunn of University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UK, and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA.

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“We thought the activity would be coordinated through Jupiter’s magnetic field, but the behavior we found is really puzzling.

“It’s stranger still considering that Saturn – another gas giant planet – doesn’t produce any X-ray auroras that we can detect, so this throws up a couple of questions that we’re currently unsure how to answer.

“Firstly, how does Jupiter produce bright and energetic X-ray auroras at all when its neighbor doesn’t, and secondly, how does it do so independently at each pole?”

This finding raises numerous questions about how auroras occur through the universe. Interestingly, Jupiter’s independently pulsing auroras indicate that astronomers have a long way to go in order to understand how the planet itself produces some of its most energetic emissions, reports the European Space Agency.

via GIPHY

“Charged particles have to hit Jupiter’s atmosphere at exceptionally fast speeds in order to generate the X-ray pulses that we’ve seen. We don’t yet understand what processes cause this, but these observations tell us that they act independently in the northern and southern hemispheres,” adds Licia Ray, from Lancaster University, UK, and a co-author.

Future studies of Jupiter’s auroras will help shed light on the phenomena produced on the gas giants poles.

In the next two years, astronomers are planning on more X-Ray observational campaigns using XMM-Newton and Chandra, and observations from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which started orbiting Jupiter in mid-2016.

In addition to the above, ESA’s Juice Spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter by 2029, and will investigate not only the Gas giant atmosphere and magnetosphere, but will also observe its auroras and the effect they cause on the Galilean Moons.

“This is a breakthrough finding, and it couldn’t have been done without ESA’s XMM-Newton,”adds Norbert Schartel, ESA project scientist for XMM-Newton.

Infrared image of the aurora at the south pole of Jupiter.

“The space observatory was critical to this study, providing detailed data at a high spectral resolution such that the team could explore the vibrant colors of the auroras and figure out details about the particles involved: if they’re moving fast, whether they’re an oxygen or sulfur ion, and so on. Coordinated observations like these, with telescopes such as XMM-Newton, Chandra and Juno working together, are key in exploring and further understanding environments and phenomena across the Universe, and the processes that produce them.”

(H/T ESA)

NASA’s Newest Photo Of Jupiter Will Blow Your Mind

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Get a Good Look: Solar System's Most Iconic Storm on Jupiter Will be Dead in Your Lifetime

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Get a good look at Jupiter's Great Red Spot while you can. The giant storm as we know it today is shrinking, and it might fade into memory within your lifetime. NASA's US$1 billion Juno probe took stunning photos of the Great Red Spot in July 2017 - the closest images we've ever gotten of the giant tempest. Scientists were floored by the level of detail beamed back by the spacecraft.

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Jupiter's super-storm is wider than Earth and has been swirling around since perhaps the 1600s. By comparison, Earth's longest recorded storm, Hurricane John in 1994, lasted just 31 days. Business Insider asked Glenn Orton - a lead Juno mission team member and planetary scientist at NASA JPL - why Jupiter's storms last so long.

“They don't, at least not all of them,” Orton said in an email. “Think of the GRS [Great Red Spot] as a spinning wheel that keeps on spinning because it's caught between two conveyor belts that are moving in opposite directions. The GRS is stable and long-lived, because it's 'wedged' between two jet streams that are moving in opposite directions.”

Jupiter's jet streams can move at speeds of more than 300 mph (500 km/h), so they impart great force onto any storms that spin backward relative to the planet's rotation. That keeps "feeding momentum into the vortex," Orton said. Juno will get its next peek at the Great Red Spot in April 2018, then again in July and September of 2019, and at least one more time in December 2020. But the spacecraft's view will not be as close or detailed as its July 2017 flyby.

“[W]e're not planning currently ever to come as close without changing the orbit from its current configuration,” Orton said. “This also assumes that the GRS maintains its current drift rate in Jupiter's atmosphere.”

When will the Great Red Spot disappear?

Earth doesn't permit storms to last for hundreds of years since, unlike Jupiter, its surface is not shrouded in tens of thousands of miles' worth of atmosphere. Instead, our planet's dynamic atmosphere is in close contact with features like oceans and land. Earth is also relatively small and rotates more slowly than Jupiter (which spins once roughly every 10 hours).

These factors shape our world's jet streams in a way that can disrupt weather systems and vortexes before things get too out of control. But Orton said the Great Red Spot, and other long-lived storms on Jupiter, still won't go on forever.

“In truth, the GRS has been shrinking for a long time,” he said.

In the late 1800s, the storm was perhaps as wide as 30 degrees longitude, Orton said. That works out to more than 35,000 miles (56,000 km)- four times the diameter of Earth. When the nuclear-powered spacecraft Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter in 1979, however, the storm had shrunk to a bit more twice the width of our own planet.

“Now it's something like 13 degrees wide in longitude and only 1.3 times the size of the Earth,” he said. “Nothing lasts forever.”

A signature storm on planet Neptune is also vanishing, ongoing Hubble telescope observations show. That storm is as large as a continent on Earth, but may disappear in a few years, according to Space.com. The remaining lifetime of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter isn't much better.

“The GRS will in a decade or two become the GRC (Great Red Circle),” Orton said. “Maybe sometime after that the GRM” - the Great Red Memory.

7 Objects Found in Outer Space That We Just Can't Explain!

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From galaxies that are 13 billion years old to changing colors of Jupiter’s great spot, we will take a look at seven objects in space that we just can’t explain. (Image: This enhanced image of SN1993J is truly an example of the beauty of the cosmos )

The Moon’s mysterious Magnetic Field: The moon has remained magnetically inert for eon but new research confirms that this was not always the case. Over 4 billion years ago an inner molten moon core whirled against lunar mantle. Pretty much like Earth’s own dynamo. Surprisingly our little moon was able to generate a mightier magnetic field than ours. No one know why sun a puny body displayed such a potent magnetic activity.

Asteroid With Rings: All the Gas Giants in our solar systems are encircled by rings. Though most of these are tenuous debris quite unlike Saturn’s massive sets of rings. Now for first time and quite unexpectedly astronomers have found rings around a much smaller body. Meet ‘Chariklo’. Chariklo is an asteroid measuring only 250 km across, yet has its own ring system. Chariklo, though the largest object in its cosmic vicinity, look like an unremarkable chunk of space rock. It turned out that this particular asteroid not only hosts one but two cosmetic necklaces. Containing a good amount of water, the larger of the rings encircling the asteroid is 7 km wide and the other one is half that size. Its discovery stunned astronomers.

The Six Tailed Asteroid: Hubble space telescope has revealed yet another incredible curiosity. An asteroid that acts as a comet. Comets are easily recognizable by their bright tails but asteroid do not show anything like that since they contain very little ice. So spotting an asteroid with not just one but six tails is quite a big deal. This particular asteroid blasts material indiscriminately in to the space like a cosmic lawn sprinkler.

The Colors of Jupiter’s Red Storm: You have probably seen amazing pictures of Jupiter’s massive hurricane that’s bee hurling across its southern hemisphere for at least 400 years. We know that it’s a hurricane like phenomena that you could fit 3 earths inside it and that’s its cooler & higher than its nearby clouds. With the research spanning over centuries we also know that it changes color from light pink to pale red and it is also shrinking but unfortunately we simply don’t know the answers about what’s really causing it and why.

Hot Jupiter Messes: Hot Jupiter or massive Gas Giants are in a tight orbit around their stars and they usually exist in the outer realms of a star system like ours. But the recent discoveries of these massive gas giant has raised many question because these gas giants were discovered way close to their stars, which is highly unlikely and also unexplainable with the current cosmological models.

Galaxies 13 billion Years Old: According to our current theories, the early universe was an approximation of a hell, a boiling opaquely dense place with only electrons and protons. Almost half a billion years passed before the baby universe cooled down enough to allow the formation of neutrons. Shortly thereafter the universal landscape settled further so that the stars and galaxies could come into being. A recent ultra-deep survey by Subaru telescope located in Hawaii and run by the National Astronomical Observatory Japan, revealed seven of the earliest galaxies ever over 13 billion light years distant. They appeared as unimaginably faint pinpricks of light.

Iciness of Saturn’s Ring: The ultra-thin icy rings of Saturn are also as mysterious as the Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. We know what they are made of and we understand some of the tidal forces that caused them to change shape. We are also pretty sure that formed some 4.4 billion years ago but we still aren’t sure how they actually formed.

Why are they made up of almost entirely of ice? And why there are able to maintain such a perfectly flat shape as they whirl around the planet with its many moons. So the formation of Saturn rings still remains a mystery.

Let Us Know What Do You Think About These Mysteries In The Comment Section.

Check Out This Amazing New Jupiter Image From Nasa's Juno Spacecraft

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NASA's $1 Billion Probe Just Sent Back Mind-Meltingly Gorgeous New Images of Jupiter

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