Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot is a 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm that has been raging since at least the 1800s — and possibly for more than 350 years. Observations with NASA’s Juno spacecraft previously indicated that the vertical extent of the Great Red Spot is over 120 miles (200 kilometers), consistent with a storm feature that develops deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Since NASA’s Voyager spacecraft visited Jupiter in 1979, the Great Red Spot has shrunk from about the size of 1.8 Earths to the size of about 1.3 Earths today.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has imaged the Great Red Spot numerous times, providing unique information on the details of how the Great Red Spot dynamically changes while it is shrinking.
This montage includes five map-projected mosaics of the giant storm, processed from images obtained by the JunoCam imager during several orbits between July 2017 and July 2019. The mosaics show how the Great Red Spot and nearby areas have changed over the course of the Juno mission.
Will the Great Red Spot continue to shrink? Only time will tell, but as we study Jupiter’s atmosphere, we learn more about how weather systems work, both on giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn and also on our own home, Earth.
Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson created this montage using JunoCam data. The images cover latitudes from about 5 degrees to 38 degrees south.
JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at https://missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing.
More information about Juno is at https://www.nasa.gov/juno and https://missionjuno.swri.edu.
Image credit:
Image data: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS
Image processing by Björn Jónsson, © CC NC SA 3.0