Jupiter-The Gas Giant

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun, after Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. It is the closest of the gas giants- the huge planets made up almost entirely of gas that dominate the Outer Solar System. Beyond Jupiter lie the gas giants Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and finally icy Pluto, the smallest and outermost planet.

Massive Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System. It is bigger than all the other planets put together and 1300 larger than Earth alone. With its family of sixteen moons, some as big as planets, the Jupiter system is a small solar system of its own right.

Like all the planets in the Solar System, Jupiter moves around the Sun following a nearly circular path called an orbit. The time it takes to complete one orbit is the length of Jupiter’s year, known as a Jovian year. Because Jupiter is much further from the sun than Earth, its orbit is much longer and a Jovian year lasts nearly 12 Earth years.

Jupiter lies 778 million kilometers (483 million miles) from the Sun – about as far as you would travel if you flew around Earth 20,000 times. But Jupiter’s distance from Earth is continually changing and depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits. They are closest when they line up on opposite sides of the Sun.

Imagine you are about to join a mission to Jupiter. The journey will be very long – you will be away for about ten years. The spacecraft will be built in orbit around Earth, and will need to have some kind of artificial gravity, since the bones and muscles of the astronauts weaken from lack of exercise, so artificial gravity is necessary. The spacecraft will also need lots of storage space.

From Earth, Jupiter looks like a large, yellow star. At its closest to Earth it is brighter than any other object in the sky, apart from the Sun, our Moon and Venus – our nearest neighboring planet. With binoculars or a small telescope, Jupiter’s circular shape can be seen, slightly squashed at the top and the bottom, with four fainter close to it. These are Jupiter’s four biggest satellites.

The most easily recognizable and popular details on Jupiter's face are the brown and cream stripes, and the big red spot.The Jovian day is only ten hours long. Despite being the largest planet in the Solar System, its day is the shortest.

Like Earth, Jupiter has Lightning and Auroras, better known as northern and southern lights. These can be seen as flashes of light on Jupiter's dark side and shimmering rings of light on the poles.

The land of Jupiter cannot be seen due to the very dense, swirling streams of cream, brown, red and occasionally blue clouds. These clouds are just the top layer in a ball of gas thousands of kilometers deep. The biggest features on Jupiter are wide bands of clouds that encircle the planet, giving it a stripped appearance. The clouds are stretched out this way by Jupiter’s rapid rotation which creates powerful high winds.

The upper clouds are nearly all cream-coloured. Other colours appear are the colours of the inner layer and appear where there are holes in the cream layer. The holes are created by areas of high pressure in the planet’s atmosphere. On Earth, high pressure causes clear blue skies, while low pressure produces clouds and bad weather. The same principle applies on Jupiter, but here the high pressure just creates gaps in the top layer of clouds rather than completely clear skies.

Brown and cream are the most common types of clouds on Jupiter, but there are others- blue clouds are located at the deepest levels of the planet's atmosphere, and red clouds can be found at even higher levels than the cream ones. Because Jupiter's atmosphere gets warmer as it gets deeper, the different cloud layers also match different temperatures- blue clouds are warmest, then brown and cream and finally the uppermost red clouds, like the Giant Red Spot, are the coldest.