February 22, 2020

Jupiter's equatorial region

An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” reports a study on the abundance of water in the atmosphere and in particular in the equatorial region of the planet Jupiter. NASA’s Juno mission team used data collected by the space probe, which has been orbiting the gas giant for about 3.5 years. The conclusion is that water makes up about 0.25% of the molecules in Jupiter’s atmosphere, about three times those present in the Sun’s atmosphere estimated through the presence of its components. This is a result that indicates an abundance much higher than that measured in 1995 by the Galileo space probe.