Now is a very good time.
tonight or any time in April to go out and look out up at
Jupiter, it's going to be very bright in the night sky.
And so easy to see with the naked eye and even better if you have
binoculars or a small telescope, you can see it well and you can see even
some of it's tiny moons if you're in a clear, dark,place.
So we've taken advantage of the fact that Jupiter is relatively close to
snap a new picture of Jupiter with the Hubble Space Telescope.
And with Hubble we can see all this gorgeous detail, the atmospheric
bands, the different colors representing sometimes different
altitudes of the clouds. The great red spot,
which we know is a giant hurricane, we're taking this image and
putting it into context of several other images that we've taken over
the last couple of decades with the Hubble Telescope, and that's giving
us this time picture of how Jupiter is changing
it's atmospheric dynamic's change. We're able
to see things like wave structure in the
atmospheric clouds, we've used Hubble's ultraviolet
capabilities to look also over the years at the aurora
the northern lights, to see how it changes in response to
the magnetic field around Jupiter. So the new image will fit into this
repeated paradigm of looking at
Jupiter, and we'll continue to look at Jupiter and the outer gas giant planets
in our solar system with Hubble in future years as well, to learn how things
change over time on this very dynamic planet.
This "Red Spot" has been observed for well over
a hundred years, but we've noticed over the last couple of decades, especially
looking with Hubble, that it is changing it is
shrinking in size, it's becoming more rounded and less oval
in shape, changes in color. So this hurricane is
changing, perhaps decreasing in some ways
and other little hurricanes are cropping up. We have something we call "Red Spot
Jupiter" I'm sorry, "Red Spot Junior" that we've seen over the last decade
with Hubble and some little white spot, little other storms that
cropping up as well. So Jupiter has a lot of atmospheric
weather dynamics, if you will, going on. We don't know exactly why
these changes take place because Jupiter is such a different planet from
Earth, it's enormous, you could fit a thousand Earths
within Jupiter and it doesn't have a solid surface
it has, this cloudy covering
it's mostly made of gas and liquid, so there's no solid
continents to slow down hurricanes like we have on Earth so we don't- we're not quite sure
why these dynamics happen but we are certainly trying to know more
by doing these observations. We even have an probe
an orbiting satellite at Jupiter called Juno
that's sending more detailed information
studying it's magnetic field, it's gravitational field so that combined with
these full planet images that we get from Hubble, are giving us the information
we need to understand it better.
Well the moons of Jupiter are fascinating. There are well
over 50 of them but the inner-most moons are particularly
interesting, these are the ones that Galileo saw over 400 years ago
but we're interested in particular in Europa this is a cold
ice covered moon, but we believe that under that icy crust
there's a liquid water ocean and of course where there's water we're always
curious to know if there could be habitability for life or
even life itself, but it's hard to study that water under the icy
crust, however recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope
have shown us potential plumes of water vapor
being ejected off the surface of this moon
perhaps between the cracks in the ice. These water
vapor plumes could be potentially sampled to study the nature
of that water by looking at it from outside the icy crust without having
at least intially to drill down through the ice to try to study that water
so it's very exciting time for us right now studying
Jupiter and it's moon Europa in particular.
The Hubble Space Telescope is about to
mark it's 27th birthday, so we're very happy
about that. What we're really happy about is that Hubble is working
very well, because throughout these decades we've had several
astronaut servicing missions to Hubble that have put in new
and improved cameras and interesting and have replaced batteries and
gyroscopes, so the telescope is in terrific shape. In fact it's more
scientifically powerful now than ever before if you can believe that
so it's in wonderful shape and we think that it will continue
to bring us terrific scientific data well into the
2020s which means it will overlap with the James Webb Space Telescope
which will launch next year. We're very excited about the
Webb Telescope as well because it will be an infrared observatory
it will provide us information that is different from what Hubble
can provide and complements what Hubble provides
so both of these observatories operating at the same time
perhaps for several years, we'll have information from optical
visible wave lengths of light into the ultraviolet that Hubble can see
and into the infrared wavelengths of light that the James Webb
Space Telescope can see, and that gives us a much richer
swath of information, but about planets like Jupiter and others
in our solar system, but also about very distant
galaxies as well, so we're excited about these capabilities
and the other space telescopes and telescopes on the ground that work together
as well to give us this full symphony of information about
the universe we live in.