NASA Juno Spacecraft Compares Jupiter's Great Red Spot To A Floating Pancake Above the Clouds

NASA's Juno space mission said Jupiter's Great Red Spot looked like a pancake floating above the clouds of the gas giant's outer atmosphere. According to the spacecraft, the storm does not stretch deep into its interior.

Juno assisted scientists in confirming that the circular storm does not simply reside on the planet's surface but extends hundreds of kilometers in the planet itself by traveling over it a couple of times.

The storm has a circumference of nearly 10,000 miles, or more than 16,000 kilometers, which means that our planet Earth could fit entirely within it. Experts never totally understood the depth of the Great Red Spot. The Giant Red Spot, according to Juno, extended far into Jupiter.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Runs Up To 311 Miles Deep, Juno Says

According to "Microwave Observations Reveal The Deep Extent And Structure Of Jupiter's Atmospheric Vortices" and "The Depth Of Jupiter's Great Red Spot Constrained By Juno Gravity Overflights," data from two sensors on NASA's Juno spacecraft reveal the Great Red Spot is between 186 and 311 miles (300 and 500 kilometers) deep.

The jet streams orbiting the Great Red Spot reach up to 1,800 miles (3,000 km) deep, with white, red, and brown hues. The storm's roots stretch below the cloud tops, where sunlight heats the atmosphere and generates water vapor, which rises, condenses, and forms clouds and rain, at least on Earth.

Mission's chief scientist, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute, said there might not be a definite cutoff at the bottom of the storm.

According to Associated Press (via US News & World Report), Bolton stated at a press conference that the storm will likely fade out gradually and continue to subside.

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The Great Red Spot, according to Bolton, is the largest yet. He explained the storm's size makes it unique in and of itself. People may assume it will be deeper just because of this, he added.

NASA Juno Mission

In 2011, NASA launched the Juno spacecraft with the mission of approaching Jupiter closer than any previous spacecraft. Juno traveled into outer space for five years, The Verge reported.

NASA launched Juno into an extremely wide orbit around Jupiter in 2016, bringing it quite near to the planet every 53 days.

Juno has gathered the majority of its data on Jupiter and what may be lurking inside the gas giant during these close encounters, known as "perijoves."

The fact that Juno was the first spacecraft to travel over Jupiter's poles - parts of the planet that scientists had never observed before the mission - is perhaps the most thrilling aspect of the project.

However, in 2019, Juno made a little change. Scientists reoriented the spacecraft to travel over it twice to acquire a better idea of what's going on beneath the Great Red Spot.

Juno studied the gravitational field of the location during these passes in an effort to determine how deep the storm is. The Great Red Spot is so massive that the Juno spacecraft can practically sense the storm's minor gravitational disturbances.