Looking at the depths of the Jupiter’s
**Great Red Spot** , a storm that has been raging on the planet for over 350 years,
**NASA** scientists have found water above the planet’s deepest clouds. The team led by Gordon l Bjoraker, an astrophysicist at NASA’s
**Goddard Space flight center** in Maryland, US, were looking from
**ground-based telescopes** at wavelengths sensitive to thermal radiation leaking from the depths of
**Jupiter** ’s persistent storm, when they detected the chemical signatures of water above the planet’s deepest clouds. The pressure of the water, combined with the measurements of another oxygen-bearing gas,
**carbon monoxide** , imply that Jupiter has two to nine times more oxygen than the sun. This finding supports theoretical and computer-simulation models that have predicted abundant water on Jupiter, the scientists said. [caption id=“attachment_5084701” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a storm that has been raging on the planet for over 350 years. Image courtesy: NASA/JPLCaltech[/caption] “The moons that orbit Jupiter are mostly
**water ice** , so the whole neighborhood has plenty of water. Why wouldn’t the planet — which is this huge
**gravity well** , where everything falls into it — be water rich, too?” Bjoraker said in
a statement. The location of the
**water cloud** , plus the amount of carbon monoxide that the researchers identified on Jupiter, confirms that Jupiter is rich in oxygen and, thus, water, Bjoraker explained. “Jupiter’s water abundance will tell us a lot about how the giant planet formed, but only if we can figure out how much water there is in the entire planet,” said Steven M Levin, from NASA’s
**Jet Propulsion Laboratory** in California. The revelation was stirring given that the team’s experiment could have easily failed. The
**Great Red Spot** is full of dense clouds, which makes it hard for
**electromagnetic energy** to escape and teach
**astronomers** anything about the chemistry within.
“It turns out they’re not so thick that they block our ability to see deeply,” Bjoraker noted. The data collected will supplement the information NASA’s **Juno spacecraft** is gathering as it circles the planet from north to south once every 53 days. If Juno returns similar water **findings** , thereby backing Bjoraker’s ground-based technique, it could open a new window into solving the water problem, said Goddard’s Amy Simon, a planetary atmospheres expert. “If it works, then maybe we can apply it elsewhere, like **Saturn** , **Uranus** or **Neptune** , where we don’t have a Juno,” she said.