Hubble Space Telescope tracks changes in giant storms on Neptune

Dhyann · 发表于 2019-03-27 14:16:46

[p]National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (Nasa) Hubble Space Telescope has been tracking the series of changes in the giant storms on Neptune.

[p style="text-align: center;"]

[br]

[p]In the year 1989, Nasa's Voyager 2 moved past Neptune which was its final planetary target before speeding to the outer limits of the solar system. Voyager 2 was the first spacecraft to visit the remote world. As the Voyager 2 zoomed by it took pictures of two giant storms brewing in Petune's southern hemisphere.

[div][/div][p]Scientists dubbed the storms [strong]"The Great Dark Spot"[/strong] and [strong]"Dark Spot 2"[/strong].

[p]Then, five years later in 1994, Nasa's Hubble Telescope snapped sharp pictures of Neptune from Earth's distance 4.3 billion kilometres. Hubble's photos revealed that both the Earth-sized Great Dark Spot and the smaller Dark Spot 2 had vanished.

[p]

[br]

[p][strong]"It was certainly a surprise,"[/strong] recalls Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

[p][strong]"We were used to looking at Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which presumably had been there for more than a hundred years."[/strong]

[p]Planetary scientists immediately began constructing computer simulations in order to understand the Great Dark Spot's mysterious disappearance.

[p]Now part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (Opal) project, Simon and her colleagues are beginning to answer these questions. Thanks to images captured by Hubble, the team has not only witnessed a storm's formation for the first time but developed constraints that pinpoint the frequency and duration of the storm systems.