Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and University of California, Berkeley produced two global maps of the gas giant from their new observations.
The observations are designed to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry to keep a running time lapse of the the volatile Jovian atmosphere. The two maps depict back-to-back rotations of the planet, making it possible to determine wind speeds and detail the churning storms on the surface in the best quality yet.
The Shrinking Great Red Spot
As Hubble observed storm filaments inside the core of the enormous storm known as the Great Red Spot in its best quality yet, it noticed that the storm had shrank in diameter by 150 miles.
The storm’s size is large enough to contain between two to three Earth-sized planets, and has been observed ever since the astronomer Galileo first pointed a telescope to the skies in the early 1600s.
