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LASP Public Lecture: Juno update at Jupiter: What’s happening to the Great Red Spot?

The giant planet Jupiter is recognized by it’s orange and white stripes—and its Great Red Spot (GRS). A large red storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere has been observed by modest Earth-based telescopes for centuries. In 1979 the Voyager spacecraft made movies of the GRS which showed that it is about the size of two Earth diameters and had hurricane-scale wind speeds that circulated in six days. Since July 4, 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been in orbit around Jupiter and made more than 30 orbits over Jupiter’s poles. Fortuitously, in the past year, Juno made some passes close to the GRS, providing new measurements of the depth of the storm and its turbulent atmospheric structures.

In this talk, LASP scientist Fran Bagenal will show how Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been observed by telescopes on Earth as well as from spacecraft near Jupiter. The storm has noticeably shrunk in size over the past 40 years…Will it disappear? Will it grow back to the size it was during the Voyager epoch?

Jan 13, 2021 07:00 PM in Mountain Time (US and Canada)