Latest Jupiter Stories
ESA The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer mission, JUICE, will carry a total of 11 scientific experiments to study the gas giant planet and its large ocean-bearing moons, ESA announced today. JUICE is the first Large-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program. Planned for launch in 2022 and arrival at Jupiter in 2030, it will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the biggest planet in the Solar System and three of its largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Cassini mission scientists have observed a huge thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn consume itself for the first time. The NASA scientists said in a paper published in the journal Icarus that they observed as the massive storm made its way around the planet, until it ran into its own tail and dissipated. "This Saturn storm behaved like a terrestrial hurricane - but with a twist unique to Saturn," Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers are contradicting one hypothesis that comet explosions may have ended the 9,000-year-old Clovis culture. The Clovis comet hypothesis was first reported in 2007, claiming a comet initiated the Younger Dryas cold period nearly 13,000 years ago. This period, also known as the Big Freeze, was a brief period of cold climatic conditions and drought, causing the collapse of the North American ice sheets. According to the...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Every year, eager sky watchers travel to the northern reaches of the Earth to catch a glimpse of the northern lights. This spectacle of color in the atmosphere – the Aurora Borealis and its companion to the south, the Aurora Australis – arises as the solar wind interacts with our atmosphere. When charged particles from our Sun hit our atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen atoms become excited. As the atoms relax, they emit...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Update: January 19, 2013 On Monday evening, astronomers (both amateurs and pros) across the country will be looking up to the skies to witness the super close dance between Jupiter and the Moon. Slooh Space Camera will also be there broadcasting live feeds of the event, giving everyone a shot at seeing the chance encounter. The waxing gibbous moon will appear about one degree south of Jupiter on Monday night, January 21. This...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online By using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, NASA officials say they have managed to complete the most detailed weather map to date for the cool, planet-like stars known as brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs, which are also sometimes known as failed stars, form out of condensing gas but do not have the mass in order to fuse hydrogen atoms and produce energy, officials from the US space agency explained in a recent statement. As a...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Volunteers affiliated with an Oxford University citizen astronomy project have discovered more than a dozen new potential planets orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars, officials from the UK-based educational institution announced on Monday. "Volunteers from the Planethunters.org website, part of the Oxford-led Zooniverse project, have discovered 15 new planet candidates orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars,"...
[ Watch the Video: ScienceCasts: Christmas Sky Show ] April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online What Christmas celebration could be complete without beautiful lights? This Christmas, the light show will not just be in your neighbor's yard, but in the sky as well. On the evening of December 25, Jupiter and the Moon are having a Christmas conjunction, which will be visible around the globe. Normally cut off from astronomical displays because of light pollution, even city...
The 100,000-square-foot neuroscience institute celebrates its grand opening, which was four years in the making. JUPITER, Fla. (PRWEB) December 08, 2012 The Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience will cap a week’s worth of coverage by the national and international media, important visits by local and state dignitaries, and its official grand-opening celebration with an all-day community event Dec. 8. All eyes have been on Jupiter since Dec. 3, when the esteemed center for brain...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Slooh will be offering a real-time feed of Jupiter on the night it is at its closest to Earth until the summer of 2021. The coverage will be of Jupiter at its brightest and biggest, and will be taking place this Sunday, December 2, starting at 5:15 p.m. Pacific. Viewers will be able to watch the celestial event live from their PC, or smartphones powered by Apple's iOS or Google's Android. The Jupiter event will be hosted by...
Latest Jupiter Reference Libraries
Satellite -- A satellite is an object that orbits another object. With sufficient tangential velocity, the object does not collide with the primary object it orbits, but maintains a distance from that object as the rate at which it falls towards that object is similar to the rate that it travels away, thus the object orbits the primary object and becomes a satellite. In other words: gravitational force serves as the centripetal force needed to make the object circle the primary...
Galileo Probe -- The Galileo probe was an unmanned probe sent by NASA to study the planet Jupiter and its moons. Named after the astronomer Galileo Galilei, it was launched on October 18 1989 by the Space Shuttle Atlantis and arrived at Jupiter on December 7 1995. Galileo's launch had been significantly delayed by the hiatus in Space Shuttle launches that occurred after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and new safety protocols that were implemented as a result forced Galileo to use...
Retrograde Motion -- Retrograde motion is the orbital motion of a body in a direction opposite that which is normal to spatial bodies within a given system. 'Retrograde' derives from the Latin words retro, backwards, and gradus, step. In the Solar system, mostly everything rotates in the same sense: all major planets orbit the Sun counterclockwise as seen from the pole star (Polaris). Most planets spin in the same sense, including Earth. The same happens with the orbital motions of the...
Positional Astronomy -- Positional astronomy is the study of the positions of celestial objects. This is the oldest branch of astronomy and dates back to antiquity. Observations of celestial objects are important for religious and astrological purposes, as well as for timekeeping. Ancient structures associated with positional astronomy include: -- Chichn Itz -- The Medicine Wheel -- The Pyramids -- Stonehenge -- The Temple of the Sun The unaided human eye can...
Planetary Ring -- A planetary ring is a ring of dust and other small particles orbiting around a planet in a flat disc-shaped region. The most spectacular and famous planetary rings are those around Saturn, but all four of the solar system's gas giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) possess ring systems of their own. The origin of planetary rings is not precisely known, but they are thought to be unstable and dissipate over the course of tens or hundreds of millions of...
![An Astronomer\](/media/gallery/spitzer-space-telescope-sirtf/thumbs/thumbs_746643main_pia17008_full.jpg "An Astronomer\")
![Jupiter\](/media/gallery/universe/thumbs/thumbs_iod-universe-042613.jpg "Jupiter\")
