More than two decades passed between the time NASA's Voyager-2 space probe flew by Saturn in 1981 and the arrival of the Cassini mission in 2004. Following up on these observations, the Juno mission probes deep inside those cloud layers to learn what makes those storms churn. These storms appear to be triggered when the heat locked up inside Jupiter warms the water clouds that lie just below the cloud tops. It occasionally witnesses giant storms that suddenly burst forth from below the clouds. Hubble has also been monitoring activity in Jupiter's atmosphere for many years. Scientists watched the warmed atmosphere closely as NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft made its approach to orbit the planet. The storm enshrouded the entire planet in dust for several months, changing the temperature of the Martian surface and atmosphere. Wolff (Space Science Institute) News Release: 2005-34 > Credit: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. In October 2005, a large regional dust storm on Mars appears as the brighter cloudy region in the middle of the planet's disk. For example, in tandem with the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft in orbit around Mars in 2001, Hubble observed Mars’ biggest dust storm in decades. The Hubble Space Telescope has worked hand-in-hand with NASA’s planetary missions. How does Hubble support NASA's planetary missions? The clouds are probably made of crystals of methane, which condense as warm bubbles of gas well up from deep in the planet's atmosphere.Īs Hubble continues its mission, we will surely learn more about the wild weather of the other planets in our solar system, reminding us that these aren’t just placid chunks of rock or balls of gas orbiting the Sun, but changing, evolving, dynamic places with unique seasons and climates that we’re just beginning to understand. Hubble revealed Uranus, once considered one of the blander-looking planets, as a dynamic world with the brightest clouds in the outer solar system. Hubble’s observations captured springtime on Neptune for the first time, tracking waves of massive storms - each one larger than the distance from Kansas to New York – with temperatures colder than -350✯ (210✬). Neptunian winds blow at an average of 900 miles per hour (1,450 km/h), and huge storms - some the size of Earth itself - come and go with regularity. On Neptune, Hubble has captured the most insightful images to date of a planet whose blustery weather bewilders scientists. For instance, Hubble has observed the downsizing of Jupiter’s most famous feature, the spinning, cyclone-like storm known as the Great Red Spot. In the outer solar system, turbulent storms dot the atmospheres of the giant planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - allowing Hubble to become an expert storm tracker. Hubble’s Earth-orbit perspective allowed it to view the entirety of the global storm, while its long-term presence in space continues to allow it to monitor changes in Mars’s seasons over months and years. In 2018, a spring dust storm erupted in the southern hemisphere and ballooned into a global event enshrouding the entire planet. Hubble’s ability to see ultraviolet, infrared, and visible light makes it the ideal meteorologist for the solar system, allowing it to probe below the cloud tops and investigate the massive storms on distant planets.Īmong these constantly shifting weather patterns are dust storms on Mars. The short-term phenomena Hubble has witnessed on other planets includes the weather - watching storms arise and dissipate across the faces of other worlds. But since its launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has kept a watchful eye on events within our own solar system, which happen on the timescale of days, weeks, and years. Many astronomical phenomena occur over millions of years. What has Hubble taught us about storms in the solar system?
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