When you spend almost more
than $1 billion on a beautiful spacecraft, it can be a very nervous wait to see
if everything actually pays off. But if and when it does, the results can be
rather glorious. And NASA’s Juno spacecraft has just paid off in a huge way.
One of the major goals of
the Juno mission, which began in July 2016 when the probe entered orbit around
Jupiter, has been to study the interior of this fascinating gas giant. We can
see its amazing cloud tops, sure, but we really didn’t know what’s going on
inside.
Well, that all changes as of
today. In a series of four papers published today in Nature, and an
accompanying News and Views article, the latest results from the spacecraft
have been revealed. And, for the first time, we’ve actually got a good idea of
what’s happening beneath the cloud tops.
“It’s a first view of how a gas giant planet works on the inside,” Jonathan Fortney from the University of California, Santa Cruz, who penned the News and Views article, told IFLScience.
While they focus on different areas of research, they
largely have a similar theme – namely relating to some of Jupiter’s key
characteristics.
One of the major findings is
that we now know how far down Jupiter’s atmosphere extends, 3,000 kilometers (1,860
miles) down from the cloud tops, which is much larger than expected. Once you
reach this depth, the composition of the planet changes dramatically.
Updated version of the previous article.
You can read the complete article here.