Bashing Jupiter
Jupiter – Turmoil from Below, Battering from Above
“Jupiter, the mythical god of sky and thunder, would certainly be pleased at all the changes afoot at his namesake planet. As the planet gets peppered continually with small space rocks, wide belts of the atmosphere are changing color, hotspots are vanishing and reappearing, and clouds are gathering over one part of Jupiter, while dissipating over another.”
With all the technological advancements and better understanding of solar system planet formations, I can’t believe to this day we still don’t know whether the core of Jupiter is solid rock or liquid metal.
Yeah! We call it a gas giant but how much is actually gas and what is the “surface” like?
Wikipedia reading:
“This cut-away illustrates a model of the interior of Jupiter, with a rocky core overlaid by a deep layer of metallic hydrogen”
“A gas giant is a massive planet with a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. They may have a dense molten core of rocky elements or the core may have completely dissolved and dispersed throughout the planet if the planet is hot enough.[4] The hydrogen and helium in “traditional” gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn constitutes most of the planet”
Random thoughts: Now with these places that have so much hydrogen in the atmosphere, if we had powered flight in the Jupiter atmosphere for example, would we just need to have a tank of oxygen and it would be air breathing for the hydrogen? Funny it’s backwards to here.
Solar system ships could have big O2 and H2 tanks, and fill up with O2 at Earth and fill up with H2 at Jupiter, lol. Now I’m starting to sound like DTARS.
Yohan: Geological type science is not exactly easy from 471 million miles at best. Requires more trips. Technology is there, but not the funding. Write to your congress.
Hopefully the current Juno mission will be able to answer the core makeup which is slated to arrive in 441 days. I can’t wait for the analysis of the exterior, interior and core structure.
Current location of Juno:
Yohan,
I’m with you on this one; very much looking forward to the new findings. However, Jupiter is extremely large, complex and chaotic, almost a star instead of a planet. So I won’t be surprised if all of the planned experiments and readings don’t give conclusive results.
Steve