Jupiter's Hot Spots

  • Released Thursday, March 14, 2013
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Jupiter's bright Equatorial Zone swirls with dark patches, dubbed "hot spots" for their infrared glow. These holes in the ammonia clouds at the top of the atmosphere allow a glimpse into Jupiter's darker, hotter layers below. In 1995 NASA's Galileo spacecraft dropped a probe directly into a hot spot, taking the first and only in situ measurements of Jupiter's atmosphere. Now, movies recorded by NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal that hot spots are not just local weather phenomena, but are in fact linked to much larger-scale atmospheric structures called Rossby waves.

NASA postdoctoral fellow David Choi discusses his study of dark features in Jupiter's atmosphere called "hot spots," and their connection to large-scale atmospheric waves.

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Cassini Mission Team, NASA JPL

This page was originally published on Thursday, March 14, 2013.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:52 PM EDT.

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Related papers

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103513000407

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103513000407

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  • Cassini/Jupiter imagery [Cassini: Imaging Science Subsystem]

    ID: 645
    Type: Mosaic Sensor: Imaging Science Subsystem Collected by: Cassini Imagery/Central Laboratory for OPerations

    Cassini/Jupiter imagery

    This dataset can be found at: http://ciclops.org/

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