|Juno is carrying a color camera to give the public its first detailed look at Jupiter’s poles. This distant image was captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which visited the giant planet in 2000 on its way to Saturn.|
First, you could stuff 1,000 earths inside Jupiter and that wouldn’t be a problem because there is no land under those clouds. No land no real estate agents.
So, what is Jupiter made of:
Jupiter is primarily composed of hydrogen (89.8%) with a quarter of its mass being helium (10.2%), though helium comprises only about a tenth of the number of molecules. It may also have a rocky core of heavier elements, but like the other giant planets (Saturn, Neptune and Uranus), Jupiter lacks a well-defined solid surface.
Because of its rapid 29,000 mph planetary rotation speed, Jupiter’s shape that of an oblate spheroid (it has a slight but noticeable bulge around the equator). Being the fifth planet,
Jupiter’s takes 11.86 earth years to complete one orbit around our sun.
The outer atmosphere is visibly segregated into several bands at different latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries. A prominent result is the Great Red Spot (larger than earth), a giant storm that is known to have existed since at least the 17th century when it was first seen by telescope.
Surrounding Jupiter is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. Jupiter has at least 67 moons, including the four large Galilean moons discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede, the largest of these, has a diameter greater than that of the planet Mercury.
One of the goals of the Juno mission is to learn more about Jupiter’s core as there is doubt if one actually exists.
The following is NASA’s description of Juno’s goals:
The primary scientific goal of the Juno mission is to significantly improve our understanding of the formation, evolution and structure of Jupiter. Concealed beneath a dense cover of clouds, Jupiter, the archetypical "Giant Planet," safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes underlying the early formation of our solar system.
Present theories of the origin and early evolution of our solar system are currently at an impasse. Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system.
Juno - View from Cassini of Jupiter's North Poles
Juno is carrying a color camera to give the public its first detailed look at Jupiter’s poles. This distant image was captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which visited the giant planet in 2000 on its way to Saturn.
Now, the spinning, solar-powered Juno spacecraft is in a highly elliptical polar orbit that skims only 5000 kilometers above the planet's atmosphere.
Building on the results of previous fly-by missions, Juno will provide new information to help us determine how, when and where this giant planet formed. Answering these questions for Jupiter is essential for an understanding of the origin of the solar system itself because Jupiter contains more mass than all the other planets combined.
Juno will seek these answers with instruments that can sense the hidden world beneath Jupiter's colorful clouds while other experiments investigate the external effects that world produces.
Jupiter has no solid surface. Instead its hydrogen and helium dominated atmosphere grows steadily denser with depth. Ultimately, but we don't know exactly where, the atmosphere must become a fluid in which hydrogen acts like an electrically conducting metal. Still deeper there may be a core of heavy elements and somewhere, somehow, an intense magnetic field is generated.
The invisible external tendrils of that field guide charged particles that crash into the polar ionospheres, producing the most intense auroras (the northern and southern "lights") in the solar system. Juno will study these and other characteristics that make Jupiter one of the most fascinating planets in the solar system.
To answer our fundamental questions about origins we especially need to know Jupiter's internal structure and global water abundance. Juno will map the internal structure by studying its influence on the planet's gravitational field with unprecedented accuracy. The water abundance will be determined by microwave radiometers that will detect thermal radiation from deep atmospheric layers, a completely new approach. Water ice brought most of the heavy elements to Jupiter. Knowing the water abundance will tell us the original form of that ice and hence help define the conditions and processes in the original cloud of dust and gas that led to the origin of Jupiter. Those same conditions and processes were forming other planets too. Because this enormous planet contains most of the water in the solar system we can expect this investigation to help us understand the origin of the life-giving water on Earth.
The launch of the Juno mission in August 2011 began a five-year journey to Jupiter, to investigate the remaining unanswered questions beneath the surface of the mysterious gas giant.
Two informative YouTube presentations on Jupiter:
Beautiful HD presentation by NASA of Hubbell space telescope images of the gas planet.
Jupiter facts in an hour long science documentary