Jupiter's Great Red Spot is more than 50 times deeper than Earth's ocean

  14 December 2017    Read: 996
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is more than 50 times deeper than Earth's ocean
NASA's Juno spacecraft is getting to the roots of Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot. New research, collected during the mission's first pass over the iconic storm, reveals that it extends far beneath the planet's surface. The spacecraft also discovered two newly identified radiation zones, Fox reports.
"One of the most basic questions about Jupiter's Great Red Spot is, how deep are the roots?" Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. Bolton and his team presented Juno's results at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans yesterday (Dec. 11).


"Juno data indicate that the solar system's most famous storm is almost one-and-a-half Earths wide, and has roots that penetrate about 200 miles [300 kilometers] into the planet's atmosphere," Bolton said.

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