Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works Pay brain
Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren Vogel bomb Here many mysteries hide beneath Jupiter's
Speaker 1: beautifully chaotic clouds, But with the help of some clever
Speaker 1: astronomical techniques and NASA's Juno spacecraft, one of the giant
Speaker 1: planet's biggest puzzles may be closer than ever to being solved.
Speaker 1: As we know, water is the key to life on Earth.
Speaker 1: Our efforts therefore to seek out life on other worlds
Speaker 1: hinges on the detection of this important compound. Though scientists
Speaker 1: don't think that life inhabits Jupiter, finding a Jovian reservoir
Speaker 1: is one of the most pressing issues in planetary science.
Speaker 1: Locating this water would help us understand how the Solar
Speaker 1: System and Jupiter itself evolved. Unfortunately, Jupiter has been notoriously
Speaker 1: unhelpful at revealing any water deep in its thick atmosphere,
Speaker 1: leaving scientists and their models of planetary formation high and dry.
Speaker 1: Before we sent spacecraft to investigate Jupiter, scientists assumed the
Speaker 1: gas giant would contain encopious amounts of H two O.
Speaker 1: The logic was simple, Earth is covered in the wet stuff,
Speaker 1: and there's lots of water in the various moons that
Speaker 1: orbit the giant planets. Therefore, Jupiter, the most massive and
Speaker 1: most gravitationally dominant planet in the Solar System, must have
Speaker 1: trapped the lion's share of our Solar System's water as
Speaker 1: it formed billions of years ago. That logic was shattered
Speaker 1: in when NASA's Galileo mission dropped a probe into the
Speaker 1: planet's atmosphere to measure its composition. Much to everyone's surprise,
Speaker 1: there was an astonishing lack of water. But the Galileo
Speaker 1: probe may not have detected water simply because it wasn't
Speaker 1: dropped in the right place. It could be as if
Speaker 1: the probe parachuted over a desert on Earth. It's not
Speaker 1: that there's no water on Earth, it's just that deserts
Speaker 1: aren't known for being awash with the stuff. Jupiter's atmosphere
Speaker 1: is dynamic, with jet stream storms and a non homogeneous composition.
Speaker 1: The probe could only sample the atmosphere it was traveling
Speaker 1: through in that one location, and that location might have
Speaker 1: been as dry as a desert. The situation changed, however,
Speaker 1: when we searchers used the powerful wm Keck observatory and
Speaker 1: NASA infrared telescope facility on Hawaii's Mona Kea to stare
Speaker 1: deep into Jupiter's biggest storm, the Great Red Spot. They
Speaker 1: released their water filled news in an August study published
Speaker 1: in the Astrophysical Journal and led by Gordon L. Bulaker
Speaker 1: of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Bure Aker said in
Speaker 1: a NASA statement, the moons that orbit Jupiter are mostly
Speaker 1: water ice, so the whole neighborhood has plenty of water.
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't the planet, which is this huge gravity well
Speaker 1: where everything falls into it, be water rich too. To investigate,
Speaker 1: Bureaker's team measured the infrared radiation leaking from deep beneath
Speaker 1: the clouds. Specifically, they studied the infrared absorption spectrum of
Speaker 1: a certain type of methane, which is known to exist
Speaker 1: in a vapor throughout the planet. This infrared radiation should
Speaker 1: leak through the clouds unimpeded, but should any water vapor
Speaker 1: clouds be present, this radiation would be blocked. During analysis
Speaker 1: of observations from Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the researchers found
Speaker 1: three distinct cloud layers were blocking this infrared signal from
Speaker 1: passing through the atmosphere, thus agreeing with the theoretical predictions
Speaker 1: for the presence of water rich clouds. They also detected
Speaker 1: large quantities of carbon monoxide, suggesting that there's lots of
Speaker 1: oxygen available in Jupiter's atmosphere to chemically bond with molecular
Speaker 1: hydrogen to form water if the temperature and pressure is
Speaker 1: just right. The next step will be to use these
Speaker 1: data to complement the Juno spacecraft's observations of Jupiter. JUNO
Speaker 1: can make spectroscopic observations even deeper into Jupiter's atmosphere, and
Speaker 1: it will do so for the entire planet, not just
Speaker 1: the Great Red Spot. But should Juno also detect this
Speaker 1: possible water cloud layer. The techniques developed by Bureaker's team
Speaker 1: using telescopes on Earth will have been proven effective at
Speaker 1: finding water deep inside Jupiter, thereby solving the gas giants
Speaker 1: watery mystery, and these techniques could then be used to
Speaker 1: probe deep into the atmospheres of other planets like Saturn, Urinus,
Speaker 1: or Neptune without having to send a probe into them.
Speaker 1: NASA named the Juno mission, by the way, after the
Speaker 1: Roman goddess Juno, who was married to Jupiter and had
Speaker 1: the handy ability to see through clouds. Today's episode was
Speaker 1: written by Ian O'Neill and produced by Tyler Clang. To
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Speaker 1: online shop at t public dot com slash brain stuff, and,
Speaker 1: of course, for more on this and lots of other
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