NASA's Juno spacecraft is about to get the best-ever look at Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot.
Juno will fly over the 10,000-mile-wide (16,000 kilometers) storm — which is so big that three Earths could fit inside it — at 10:06 p.m. EDT tonight (July 10; 0206 GMT on July 11), during the probe's sixth science flyby of Jupiter.
The encounter will provide humanity its first up-close looks at the Great Red Spot, which astronomers have been monitoring since 1830.
"Jupiter's mysterious Great Red Spot is probably the best-known feature of Jupiter," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. "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."
The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched in August 2011 and arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Ever since, the spacecraft has been looping around the gas giant every 53.5 days in a highly elliptical orbit that brings it within a few thousand miles of Jupiter's cloud tops at the closest point, or perijove. Read more....
Juno will fly over the 10,000-mile-wide (16,000 kilometers) storm — which is so big that three Earths could fit inside it — at 10:06 p.m. EDT tonight (July 10; 0206 GMT on July 11), during the probe's sixth science flyby of Jupiter.
The encounter will provide humanity its first up-close looks at the Great Red Spot, which astronomers have been monitoring since 1830.
"Jupiter's mysterious Great Red Spot is probably the best-known feature of Jupiter," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. "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."
The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched in August 2011 and arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Ever since, the spacecraft has been looping around the gas giant every 53.5 days in a highly elliptical orbit that brings it within a few thousand miles of Jupiter's cloud tops at the closest point, or perijove. Read more....