Jupiter
Jupiter is the biggest planet in our Solar System, it is only one thousand of the mass of the Sun, but the mass of Jupiter is 2.5 times the mass of all other planets in
our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified with the gas giants together with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The planet was named after the Roman god Jupiter by the Romans, which was also a leader and that explains why this enormous planet received this name. One year at Jupiter takes 4332.59 days on Earth which is the same as 11.86 years on Earth. For so far known Jupiter has got about 67 moons. It has got a diameter of 142,984 km and a mass of 1.899*10^27 kg. So this planet is very big but because it is a gas planet the mass is relatively seen not too big. The temperature on Jupiter is around -108 degrees celsius and the atmosphere consists is build up from: 90% H2, 9.7% He, 0.3% CH4. A lot of spacecrafts have already been to Jupiter see the scheme below for their closest approaches to the planet. Galileo Galilei discovered the four biggest moons of Jupiter with a telescope: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Those are known as the ''Galilean moons''.
| Spacecraft | Closest approach |
Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Pioneer 10 | December 3, 1973 | 130,000 km |
| Pioneer 11 | December 4, 1974 | 34,000 km |
| Voyager 1 | March 5, 1979 | 349,000 km |
| Voyager 2 | July 9, 1979 | 570,000 km |
| Ulysses | February 8, 1992 | 408,894 km |
| February 4, 2004] | 120,000,000 km | |
| Cassini | December 30, 2000 | 10,000,000 km |
| New Horizons | February 28, 2007 | 2,304,535 km |
Some facts About Jupiter:
We don't know for sure when Jupiter was discovered- the earliest noted record of Jupiter is from Babylonian letters from the 7th or 8th century before Christ.
Something striking about Jupiter is the Great Red Storm - This is a storm which lasts already for 350 years and it is the size of two times the Earth.
Jupiter is the third brightest object in the Solar System - It is one of the five planets that can be seen with the naked eye from Earth, the others are Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn.
