Today, the space agency has posted the first photographs of the Great Red Spot, a huge vortex on Jupiter, first photographed by Juno from an altitude of only 9,000 km.
We have already written that recently the NASA Juno space exploration vehicle approached the Great Red Spot of Jupiter at a distance of 9000 km to take a detailed photo of this mysterious phenomenon. The agency released the first images of the colossal storm today. Kevin Gill, a software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has processed several images of the anticyclone cloud cap with wind speeds of up to 600 km / h.
Juno's voyage began in August 2011, and arrived in Jupiter's orbit in July 2016. Since then, it has been studying the planet's atmosphere, collecting magnetic field data and recording auroras to give astronomers an idea of the structure of the gas giant and how how the planet was formed.
During such a close flyby, all eight Juno research instruments were engaged in a detailed study of the atmosphere and magnetic field in the area of the BKP. The device observed how the temperature zones are located inside the vortex and how deeply these or those molecular layers of various gases penetrate into it. This is necessary for scientists to be able to answer the most interesting question: at what distance from the top is the "root", the lowest level of the storm.
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The Great Red Spot is one huge mystery. Astronomers have been observing it for 150 years, but they still cannot understand how a 16,000-kilometer storm can persist and maintain activity for such a long time. Perhaps a closer look at the cloudy surface will help to get closer to understanding the principles of the BKP device: many scientists believe that the storm originates deep in the gas planet, but this hypothesis requires confirmation and much more complex analysis.