Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and is the largest one in the solar system. If Jupiter were hollow, more than one thousand planet Earth’s could fit inside of it. Jupiter also contains more matter than all of the other planets combined. It has a mass of 1.9 x 1027 kg and is 88,736 miles (142,800 kilometers) across the equator. Jupiter has 16 satellites, four of which - Callisto, Europa, Ganymede and Io - were observed by Galileo as long ago as 1610. There is a ring system, but it is very faint and is totally invisible from the Earth. These rings were discovered in 1979 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The atmosphere is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, with small mounts of methane, ammonia, water vapor and other compounds.
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The Great Red Spot
The colorful horizontal bands, are atmospheric clouds and storms that illustrate Jupiter's forceful weather systems. The cloud patterns can change within hours or days. The Great Red Spot is a intricate storm moving in a counter-clockwise direction. The outer edge materials appear to rotate in four to six days. The motions that are closer to the center are generally smaller and random in direction. An array of other smaller storms and whirlpools can be found throughout the other clouds.
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Meteor Shower of 1994
In 1994, July 16-22, over twenty fragments of the famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet collided with the planet Jupiter. The comet was discovered the previous year by astronomers Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy. This comet was observed by astronomers at hundreds of observatories around the world as it crashed into Jupiter's southern hemisphere. The meteor shower was a historic event for the scientific community because it was the first time scientist have been able witness and record collisions on another plant. The scientific community has studied the images taken from the shower to try and comprehend the catastrophic effects of a comet colliding with a planet to try and figure out what could happen to Earth if such an event occurred.
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Meteor Shower of 1993,
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