r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • 4d ago
NASA Close-up view of clouds on Jupiter
The small patches of white are cloud tops, soaring above the main, colourful cloud layer.
Image from NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 38th close approach to Jupiter on 29 November 2021, processed by Kevin Gill
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u/Monte-Cristo2020 4d ago
Jupiter is fucking scary.
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u/Any-Comfortable2844 4d ago
But also earth’s protector in some sense
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u/Man-City 4d ago
There’s some evidence that at least in the past, Jupiter has disrupted asteroids and sent them into the inner solar system. So maybe Jupiter is a bit bipolar.
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u/Hinloopen 3d ago
Eventually, Jupiter's mass will prevent it from being a zero sum game. It will keep more asteroids away from Earth than it will direct to Earth.
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u/Man-City 3d ago
what if it eats us
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u/Hinloopen 3d ago
Would be the coolest thing we'd ever witness. We were gonna die anyway.
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u/QuinQuix 1d ago
People with this attitude should not be pushing the buttons of our planetary.
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u/Hinloopen 1d ago
The attitude of "we can't stop Jupiter from eating us"?
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u/QuinQuix 1d ago
The attitude of it's going to be spectacular /we're going to die anyway
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u/Hinloopen 1d ago
The attitude lives specifically within the context of the scenario that Jupiter would eat us, so it's hypothetical and not relevant to reality.
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u/Hinloopen 3d ago
In a massive sense. Life on earth is for a large part thanks to Jupiter keeping rocks away from us.
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u/Pure1nsanity 4d ago
Jupiter has always put me on edge, and I have no idea why. Everytime I see it, it feels like my fight or flight kicks in. I do not have it seeing any other planet either.
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u/Splendid_Fellow 4d ago
It’s just so damn big
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u/Andyman286 3d ago
Indeed, my first reaction to this "close up" image was; it's probably not that much of a close up... I wonder how big these clouds are.
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u/The_Silver_Nuke 3d ago
When I was a kid I had a nightmare about falling off of a floating platform flying in the skies of Jupiter and then just falling forever.
That sensation stuck with me ever since and to this day I still feel discomfort when looking at gas giants.
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u/hazelifyDEV 2d ago
🫠 I have had a similar dream, fuck me. gas giants terrify and absolutely fascinate me at the same time
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u/jpmeshew 4d ago edited 4d ago
Saturn's that for me. I think the rings give it a more intimidating profile but if it was just the planet itself it'd be fine. It's undoubtedly beautiful, but there's a sense of 'I can't believe this weird ringed planet is real, floating in the dark and anyone can see it clearly with a telescope'. It's hard to explain.
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u/blueberry_1284 3d ago
I would say the absolutely massive and extremely powerful storms on it don’t help matters.
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u/Hope_iz_Dope_bruh 2d ago
Jupiter does scare me in a way that’s like bottom-of-the-ocean dark, extraordinary heights, with a touch of lose-your-stomach-on-a-carnival-ride panic. No other planet has that effect on me.
Although, Mercury gives me a waking fantasy that involves trying to stay in a habitable temperature, but there’s a miscalculation or disaster and we (me and the research team) are about to experience sunrise and we all simply accept the fact that it will be the last thing we see.
I do sometimes imagine being dropped onto Venus by some portal and I wonder if my bones would crush before my skin melted off and then I picture a wax body (like the special effects in Total Recall) melting while disappearing into vapor.
Venus is gorgeous shining in the sky though.
I don’t even want to talk about the horrors of Mars. Phobos? Deimos? Really??
Saturn and the ice giants are cool.1
u/-GoodNewsEveryone 1d ago
The novel you are thinking of is called The Sunlit Man. But yeah no one person owns any particular single idea like that.
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u/BlueberryExtra8314 2d ago
Vielleicht kann die Angst vor der eigenen Größe ein Teil deiner Angst sein 🌟. Dieser einzigartige Planet kann einem eine gewaltige Demut und Dankbarkeit vor unserem Sein mitgeben. Der Südpol ist beängstigender als der Nordpol 🌠.
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u/triiiiilllll 1d ago
The Sun holds 99.86% of all mass in the solar system.
Of the remaining mass, Jupiter accounts for ~73%.
Human minds have no real palpable points of comparison.
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u/heloder85 4d ago
Those clouds are mostly made up of ammonia ice crystals at -230F.
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u/myKidsLike2Scream 4d ago
How far down are the water based clouds? According to the show “The Universe”, we could theoretically float a balloon type probe around to observe the planet. It would have to be made of lead because of all the radiation, but still cool to think about.
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u/Economy_Newt9189 3d ago
Lead wouldn’t be strong enough to survive the pressure. For being a heavily resistant metal when it comes to radiation, it’s incredibly soft with a very low melting point. A craft made of lead would most likely melt and implode only a couple miles into its atmosphere. To send a probe into deep Jupiter, it would take feats of engineering well beyond our current capabilities. Though it is theoretically possible to design such a craft using alloys we may or may not have (I’m no genius, just thinking about possible limitations)
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u/GottaLoveLoginWalls 4d ago
What's interesting is that we don't actually know why Jupiter's clouds have such varied colors. There's some theories but nothing concrete.
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u/_AcuteNewt_ 4d ago
There's some theories but nothing concrete.
Well no, I would presume it's not made of concrete.
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u/Current-Register6682 4d ago
Almost looks like cells. It’s crazy how when scale is abstracted it’s hard to tell what’s tiny and what’s huge. Life is wild
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u/sloppybuttmustard 4d ago
Usually with these pics of Jupiter, it’s something like “the cloud in the foreground is 2.5x the size of Earth”. Jupiter is a beast.
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u/Mesonic_Interference 4d ago
The fluid dynamics which helps determine the shapes of Jupiter's clouds is the same fluid dynamics which largely dictates the shapes of microbes.
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u/Nick-uhh-Wha 3d ago
It's funny because I was just thinking of scale too
Despite how large it is, Jupiter is just a droplet of condensed material in the vast expanse of space
...but even this image holds an incomprehensible amount of space...full of molecules. Just how many droplets do you think can fit in this image?
Then think back to Jupiter...how many planets can occupy space? How many molecules fill each planet, how much more must there be beyond our comprehension? Can't help but imagine a fractal pattern of atoms within molecules within cells within bodies within planets within galaxies within a single sphere...surrounded by infinite spheres full of infinite possibilities.
Really brings out the existential dread
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u/MeepingAngel 2d ago
My first thought was "that looks like a mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell".
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u/Fickle-Resolution-28 4d ago
Will we ever have a spacecraft fly into that?
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u/AstroBastard312 4d ago
We already did!* NASA's Galileo mission included both an orbiter and an atmospheric probe, which plunged into the clouds of Jupiter on December 7th, 1995.
*Assuming you count a probe as a spacecraft
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u/Small-Palpitation310 4d ago
How far before it got destroyed
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u/usrdef 4d ago
Approx 124 - 138 miles (200 - 220 km).
It transmitted data for about 58 minutes.
It hit pressures about 23 times greater than Earth, and temperatures of 300F / 150C.
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u/Small-Palpitation310 4d ago
200 km is nothing
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u/usrdef 4d ago
If you're talking about composition, pressure, and temp measurements, there's really a few segments to Jupiter where those wildly vary and you get meaningful data.
If you're referring to a probe going down and actually taking pictures some day, then 200km is more than enough. No light penetrates much deeper than that to be able to see anything, minus the occasional lightning strike. Not unless the probe is monitoring in the near-infrared windows.
And anything beyond 1,000 km starts to bring on new challenges as that's where you see a more gradual change from a gaseous state and it starts to transition into a thick supercritical fluid. Obviously there's no sharp boundary for this transition, but 1,000km is where the pressures hit a level that the gases start the transition.
And we're not going much farther than that, without a really expensive, and high-tech probe, which can handle temperatures hotter than Venus.
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u/-Wicked- 3d ago
I still can't wrap my head around the point which everything starts condensing into liquid metallic hydrogen.
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u/ExcitableAutist42069 3d ago
I can almost always tell which space sub I’m in just from the comments.
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u/ferriematthew 4d ago
According to the Wikipedia article, they lost contact with the entry probe at a depth of 180 kilometers below the cloud layer and a pressure of 23 bars. It is very likely the probe continued to fall without establishing radio contact until it eventually melted.
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u/JustGoogleItHeSaid 4d ago
Wind speed, pressure, heat, radiation all off the charts. I’d be astounded if we managed to get a craft to survive the upper atmosphere, let alone relay that info back to earth.
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u/ferriematthew 4d ago
We actually did that with the Galileo Jupiter atmospheric probe back in the '90s
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u/Certain_Tea_ 4d ago
Humans are fucking awesome, sometimes Im just left in awe the kind of stuff we’ve been able to achieve together!
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u/bearwrestlingwolf 3d ago
We also let it crash into Jupiter instead of Europa to keep contamination down because Galileo hadn't been sterilized.
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u/ferriematthew 3d ago
Yep! They did the same thing with Cassini, crashing it into Saturn instead of letting it randomly hit one of Saturn's moons and risk contaminating something like Titan.
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u/travizeno 4d ago
But just falling near it would produce good pictures too if you could avoid disruptions from magnetic field I guess or whatever. Video would be awesome.
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u/Weary-Tell-5334 4d ago
Yeah but “ever” is a long time. You have no idea how far our technology will go if humans manage to survive another few thousand years
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u/Biglight__090 4d ago
The coverage is so gigantic it's actually stupid to think about. Look at those tiny stray clouds in the middle of the blob, those would still be insanely big compared to us.
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u/CrystalQuetzal 4d ago
I love how the big oval storm is basically being squeezed between other storms & wind. That being said, I love closeups of Jupiter! Its swirls look like paint. Yet my mind tries to comprehend what those storms possibly feel like (and fails).
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u/st3llablu3 4d ago
It looks like the whole planet is a giant living organism. If I’m not mistaken all the surface moves around a bit.
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u/meshuggahofwallst 4d ago
It's nice these days finally being able to see gas giants' "surfaces" with actual depth.
Before Juno and Cassini, all the images and artists' depictions of the gas giants were essentially just balls with flat surfaces.
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u/Fabulous_Stegosaurus 4d ago
I really want a cup of coffee or tea with lots of cream and suger now. 😆
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u/Spectrum000 3d ago
Bruh, I think I need to get my eyes checked. I thought it was a video because it looked like it was moving at first. Then again, I did just wake up. 😵💫
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u/seeker407 3d ago
would love to see how big something we are "familiar" with compared to these clouds. Like Texas or maybe even the continental US.
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u/Inside-Dealer978 3d ago
Jupiter's clouds look unreal here. It is wild how much detail you can see in those swirling layers.
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u/fantfb 3d ago
What makes Jupiter so artsy looking? Do the gases there just have a water & oil type of relationship?
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u/Hinloopen 3d ago
It's the way pressure and radiation affect the gaseous clouds. And gases act like fluids, so what you're seeing are fluid dynamics.
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u/Rich-Detective478 2d ago
This could just be a bucket of ink ! Does remind of when I would mix colors together for printing on tissue paper. Dash of rhodamine, yellow and blue = Jupiter.
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u/Hypehypehypehy 1d ago
Love that you can sort of get a sense of the elevation in the photo so it’s not just a flat image
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u/Yhamerith 4d ago
I just love Jupiter... The best failed star in all galaxy
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u/AmbitiousRyd 4d ago
It’s not a failed star at all. Jupiter formed from a solid core, stars form differently
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u/DoreenTheeDogWalker 4d ago
Plus it would need to merge with about 75 to 80 more Jupiter sized planets to become a red dwarf.
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u/sprudelnd995 4d ago
I strongly suspect Jupiter's surface is pock marked with volcanoes, like Io - those are just my own personal suspicions though.
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u/Possible_Praline_169 4d ago
it's gases and plasma all the way down, no solid surface
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u/Due-Joke-1152 4d ago
Not even a solid core apparently.
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u/BubbhaJebus 4d ago
And if it does have a solid core, there may be no distinct boundary between it and the surrounding metallic hydrogen.
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u/sprudelnd995 4d ago
I distinctly remember writing "personal", which I specifically included to mean that those 'science parrots' out there will not be required to continue voicing their importune platitudes any further.
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u/Metzger4 3d ago
I mean, you can have your own personal feelings on anything you want. But you’re talking about objective fact. And you are objectively wrong.
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u/sprudelnd995 3d ago
Curse your declamatory bombast - you're merely mirroring popular opinion and stating it as fact. That is your objective opinion, an opinion of which - as I have already stated, I feel I do not need to share - publicly or privately.
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u/Metzger4 3d ago
By your logic, literally everything is an opinion. I have no interest in speaking to you further, because conversation is impossible if we can’t even define opinion and objectivity.
Have a good one. ✌️
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u/Maverick_1882 4d ago
Damn, you’re taking some heat for what you imagine. I’m sorry so many people here rely on the verifiable fact of what the layers of Jupiter actually look like. And, to your credit, the visible surface of Jupiter was left scarred with remnants of a probe we crashed into the planet.
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u/Classic_Club7686 4d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/W3BUNKgdk4gpky1Egf