Page 14 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

 The Great Red Spot is still
 This picture of the area around the Great Red Spot shows clouds of differing heights. Reddish-orange areas show high-level clouds, yellow areas show midlevel clouds, and green areas show lower-level clouds. Light blue shows ammonia ice clouds. The ammonia cloud
is produced by powerful updrafts of ammonia-laden air from deep within Jupiter’s atmosphere.
present in Jupiter’s atmosphere more than 300 years after it was first observed. It is now known that it is a vast storm, spinning like a fierce anticyclone with winds inside approaching
500 km/hr.
The Great Red Spot is the
largest known atmospheric system in the solar system. It is almost twice the size of the Earth and one-sixth the diametre of Jupiter.
The Red Spot changes its shape, size, and colour, but not its latitude.
Great Red Spot
The Great Red Spot—more pink in colour than actually red—lies among the belts of moving cloud, drifting along with them, although at a slower rate. There are three large ovals south of the Great Red Spot, which are also fairly permanent features. Again, they stay at their own latitudes like the rest of the clouds.
Although the Great Red Spot is the most conspicuous part of the planet, we still have limited knowledge of what it is, and what makes it so large and so permanent.
The gases in the Great Red Spot travel counterclockwise, making a complete rotation within the spot every 12 days. If it is a large eddy, then the apparently still-looking centre tells us it cannot be a region where gases are welling up. If it were, it would look much like a giant hurricane as seen from space.
Coloured clouds
The clouds that we see are probably made of different substances at different heights. Just as we have tall clouds whose tops are made of ice crystals, so Jupiter appears to have tall white clouds, in this case made of frozen ammonia crystals. The brown clouds are lower and probably made
of condensed ammonium hydrosulfide, with sulfur compounds providing the colouration.
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