THIS week’s #SLSWednesdayWord fits in well with NASA’s current mission to explore Jupiter.
Zenography is the study of Jupiter. Jupiter is the fifth furthest from the sun and the largest in our solar system.
Currently, NASA’s Juno Mission is exploring Jupiter.
According to NASA, early results from the mission reveal it to be a “complex, gigantic, turbulent world, with Earth-sized polar cyclones, plunging storm systems that travel deep into the heart of the gas giant, and a mammoth, lumpy magnetic field that may indicate it was generated closer to the planet’s surface than previously thought.”
The mission launched on 5 August 2011 and entered Jupiter’s orbit on 4 July 2016.
PHOTO: NASA/SWRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Sean Doran
“We are excited to share these early discoveries, which help us better understand what makes Jupiter so fascinating,” said Juno programme executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, Diane Brown.
Images from the ‘JunoCam’ show both Jupiter’s poles are covered in Earth-sized storms.
“We’re puzzled as to how they could be formed, how stable the configuration is, and why Jupiter’s north pole doesn’t look like the south pole. We’re questioning whether this is a dynamic system, and are we seeing just one stage, and over the next year, we’re going to watch it disappear, or is this a stable configuration and these storms are circulating around one another,” said Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Scott Bolton.
Interested in zenography? Go to the NASA website to learn more about the subject, Jupiter and the Juno Mission.
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