Huge Storms Converge on Jupiter 205
tpoker writes to tell us NASA is reporting that the two biggest storms in the solar system are about to collide on Jupiter. From the article: "Storm #1 is the Great Red Spot, twice as wide as Earth itself, with winds blowing 350 mph. The behemoth has been spinning around Jupiter for hundreds of years. Storm #2 is Oval BA, also known as 'Red Jr.,' a youngster of a storm only six years old. Compared to the Great Red Spot, Red Jr. is half-sized, able to swallow Earth merely once, but it blows just as hard as its older cousin."
Re:Do the editors think we are that dumb? (Score:2, Interesting)
But now you can throw your maths right out the window, because you're using the wrong formula. From Wikipedia, "The Great Red Spot's dimensions are ~24-40,000 km × 12-14,000 km". It's not circular, sorry.
At it's smallest size (which I understand it is close to at the moment - It has halved in size over the past 100 years), it is almost exactly 2 Earths wide, and is also 2 times the Earth's cross-section in area.
Pretty Sweet "Amateur" Telescope ..? (Score:3, Interesting)
What kind of strength/magnification do you need to see Jupiter in that resolution?
Premature (Score:2, Interesting)
New Horizons is heading toward Pluto, but will use Jupiter to kind of "slingshot" it faster toward Pluto. NASA doesn't want to pay for bigger rockets, so they cheat by stealing a small slice of Jupiter's orbital momentum. Let's hope Big Jup doesn't find out, because he is really really big and strong.
Re:Collide? (Score:5, Interesting)
When was the last time a probe survived Jupiter? (Score:2, Interesting)
Meteorologists say that it's practically an unsolvable problem, and that's on a planet which they already know a lot about. With a planet such as Jupiter, there's simply too many unknowns. Everyone knows that the more unknowns you have in a problem, the harder it becomes to solve. The problem here is that, for Jupiter, the problem/formula is almost entirely unknowns.