Posted on by Carolyn Collins Petersen

An Ongoing Study of Jupiter’s Cloudtops Has Been Going on for 40 Years

A Hubble Space Telescope image of Jupiter in 2020. Planetary scientists studied temperature changes in its lower atmosphere and may soon be able to predict Jupiter weather. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team.
A Hubble Space Telescope image of Jupiter in 2020. Planetary scientists studied temperature changes in its lower atmosphere and may soon be able to predict Jupiter weather. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team.

Some of the most useful discoveries about distant objects take time to complete. For example, several generations of planetary scientists have been studying the clouds of Jupiter since the late 1970s. Their observations focused on the planet’s upper troposphere. The results show unexpected patterns in how the temperatures of Jupiter’s belts and zones change over time.

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