NASA Spacecraft Discovery From Jupiter
In 2011, NASA sent a spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Space Force in Florida that was sent to and arrived at Jupiter in 2016. This mission was the Juno mission. In 2019, the spacecraft slightly changed course and went over the Great Red Spot twice. The information that NASA collected about this evergoing storm changed the way they perceive things and was beyond what they had expected.
Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system. Its storm, the Great Red Spot, is an enormous vortex that has been scientifically recorded to have been active for 200 years, though it is believed to have been going on for longer. It is larger than Earth being about 10,000 miles wide and is the biggest storm in our solar system.
Scott Bolton, principal investigator of NASA's Juno mission and director of space science, and his team used microwave sensors to get the first ever 3D model of the Great Red Spot. Scientists had initially thought that the storm’s depth went as far as the planet's cloud level but the microwaves showed that the storm extends below the cloud deck of the planet. They discovered that the storm is between 124 and 311 miles beyond the depths of where clouds form and where water condenses. This is much deeper than the scientists had thought. This discovery is very different from the way scientists thought Earth’s atmosphere worked. “How that works is going to require new models and new ideas to explain," Bolton stated.
When passing by the Great Red Spot, the spacecraft was moving at 13,000 miles per hour. The storm's gravitational force jolted the spacecraft during its orbit when passing the storm. Scientists were able to see when this happened because if the spacecraft was pushed closer or farther to Earth the changing distance caused the radio waves that were sent back to Earth to be slightly stretched and squeezed. This phenomenon is known as the Doppler Shift. Other observations show that the Great Red Spot has been shrinking for nearly a century and a half and it is unknown how long this will occur.
NASA scientists announced they will be continuing to do their research using the Juno spacecraft through September 2025. There are hopefully many more crazy phenomenons that are yet to be discovered.