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Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from Voyager 1 Color Inverted

What will become of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot? Recorded as shrinking since the 1930s, the rate of the Great Red Spot’s size appears to have accelerated just in the past few years. A hurricane larger than Earth, the Great Red Spot has been raging at least as long as telescopes could see it. Like most astronomical phenomena, the Great Red Spot was neither predicted nor immediately understood after its discovery. Although small eddies that feed into the storm system seem to play a role, a more full understanding of the gigantic storm cloud remains a topic of continued research, and may result in a better understanding of weather here on Earth. The above image is a digital enhancement of an image of Jupiter taken in 1979 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it zoomed by the Solar System’s largest planet. NASA’s Juno spacecraft is currently heading toward Jupiter and will arrive in 2016.

Image Credit: NASA, JPL; Digital processing: Björn Jónsson (IAAA), Color: thedemon-hauntedworld

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows Earth and its moon from between Saturn’s rings

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbits Saturn, took a picture of Earth from between Saturn’s rings — with Earth’s moon at its side.

Captured at 1:41 a.m. Eastern on April 12, 2017, the spacecraft was 870 million miles away from its home planet when it took the image.

Earth is seen as a tiny bright speck in the center of the picture. Upon cropping and zooming in, its moon can be seen to the left as an even smaller dot. The photograph, captured by the Imaging Science Subsystem, doesn’t clearly show which part of Earth is facing the ringed planet at the time the picture was taken, but NASA has revealed it is the southern Atlantic Ocean. Read more (4/21/17)

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The orbit of Jupiter protects the Earth from asteroids.

This morning, an Atlas V rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a US Navy communications satellite into space. 

It was another smooth take off for the United Launch Alliance, the company that manufactures the Atlas V. It was a particularly beautiful launch as well; the rocket left a spectacular multi-colored trail in its wake as it ascended into space

Our planet seen from Saturn, captured by the Cassini spacecraft

Image credit: NASA / Cassini

The first Space Launch System hardware from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans just arrived at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. We take a minute to introduce you to the crew of NASA’s barge Pegasus. The crew made an 18-day journey on the barge leaving New Orleans on April 28 and arriving at Marshall on May 15. The barge delivered a structural test version of the core stage engine section of SLS, NASA’s new heavy-lift rocket. Pegasus will deliver four test articles of the rocket’s core stage to Marshall for tests that will simulate the forces experienced during launch. Pegasus will later ferry the flight-ready core stage to NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, for testing and then to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for integration of the SLS flight vehicle in the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Experiment resolves mystery about wind flows on Jupiter

Using a spinning table and a massive garbage can, geophysicist leads team in simulating the planet’s atmosphere

One mystery has been whether the jets exist only in the planet’s upper atmosphere – much like Earth’s own jet streams – or whether they plunge into Jupiter’s gaseous interior. If the latter is true, it could reveal clues about the planet’s interior structure and internal dynamics.

Now, UCLA geophysicist Jonathan Aurnou and collaborators in Marseille, France, have simulated Jupiter’s jets in the laboratory for the first time. Their work demonstrates that the winds likely extend thousands of miles below Jupiter’s visible atmosphere.

This research is published online in Nature Physics.

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