2023 BU will pass over the southern tip of South America on January 26. Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech
An asteroid is on its way to Earth, but don’t worry—the end is not here. The asteroid, dubbed 2023 BU, is about the size of a box truck and is not projected to impact our planet during its flyby on Thursday. However, it will be “one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded,” according to a NASA scientist.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab said in a release on Wednesday that 2023 BU is about 11.5 to 28 feet (3.5 to 8.5 meters) wide, which is small enough to mostly burn up in our atmosphere if it were to hit us. But NASA doesn’t expect 2023 BU to slam into the planet; instead the asteroid will pass about 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) above the southern tip of South America on Thursday, January 26, at 4:32 p.m. PST. NASA was able to calculate the position and trajectory of the asteroid using Near Earth Asteroid Scout, a hazard assessment system.
“Scout quickly ruled out 2023 BU as an impactor, but despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who developed Scout. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”
2023 BU is passing closer to us then some of the satellites orbiting our planet, and Earth’s gravity is changing the asteroid’s path around the Sun from circular to more elongated. The asteroid was discovered by Gennadiy Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea on January 21. Since then, observatories across the planet have also detected 2023 BU, leading to robust models of the asteroid’s path and potential hazard.
Astronomers’ detection of and prompt study of 2023 BU shows how robust humanity’s asteroid detection workflow is becoming. Our ability to eventually defend our planet is advancing, too, after the successful DART test mission to deflect asteroid last October.
The 16.7 pound (7.6 kilogram) meteorite was found sitting on the surface of the Antarctic desert, where its black composition contrasted against the snow. Image: Maria Valdes
Researchers combing the surface of Antarctica for space rocks hit the jackpot by finding five meteorites in the tundra, one of which weighs almost 17 pounds.
The expedition team found the meteorites sitting on top of the snow in Antarctica, where the rocks’ black bodies stuck out against the white snow fields of the continent. Antarctica is an ideal place to find relatively undisturbed space rocks, since its dry climate prevents excess weathering over time. Maria Valdes, a research scientist with the Field Museum and the University of Chicago, and her team found a total of five meteorites during their hunt in December, one of which weighs 16.7 pounds (7.6 kilograms).
“Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even tiny micrometeorites can be incredibly scientifically valuable,” said Valdes in a statement. “But of course, finding a big meteorite like this one is rare, and really exciting.”
Researchers Maria Schönbächler, Maria Valdes, Ryoga Maeda, and Vinciane Debaille pose with the largest of the meteorites. Image: Maria Valdes
Valdes estimates that, out of the tens of thousands of meteorites that have been found in Antarctica, only around 100 are as large as the one her team found. To find the meteorites, the researchers rode on snow mobiles and walked in areas that were previously mapped and identified through satellite imagery as potential landing spots for meteorites. When the team found a suspected meteorite, they used a handheld tool to test the magnetic properties of the rock, Valdes explained in an email to Gizmodo. While most of these meteorites stay on the surface, even those that sink into the ice will reemerge as glaciers shift and move.
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“Going on an adventure exploring unknown areas is exciting,” said Vinciane Debaille, a member of the research team from Université Libre de Bruxelles, in a statement. “But we also had to deal with the fact that the reality on the ground is much more difficult than the beauty of satellite images.”
While the find is exciting, the next step for the scientists is to determine what the meteorites can tell us about the universe. The five rocks Valdes and her team found with be analyzed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, while soil samples from the area will be analyzed by the team themselves.
The Danuri Lunar Orbiter caught this view of Earth.Image: KARI
From its position in low lunar orbit, South Korea’s first Moon mission caught a unique glimpse of Earth rising from behind the cratered surface of our natural satellite.
The Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), also known as Danuri, beamed back beautiful black-and-white images of Earth captured by its high-resolution camera. The two images were taken on December 24 and 28 and released by the Korean Aerospace Research Institute on Monday.
Image: KARI
The images show a solemn Earth in the distance, while the Moon’s dusty surface appears in the foreground. From our perspective on Earth, we often see the Moon rising above our planet’s surface. But the images taken by Danuri from lunar orbit provide a counterintuitive view of our home planet glimmering behind the Moon’s surface.
Danuri captured the first image when it was 77 miles (124 kilometers) above the lunar surface and the second when it was around 213 miles (344 kilometers) above its surface.
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Image: KARI
Danuri launched on August 5 on board SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, marking South Korea’s first deep space mission. On December 17, the spacecraft completed its first lunar orbit insertion maneuver and entered into lunar orbit.
The 1,100-pound (500-kilogram) probe is equipped with four science instruments built locally, as well as a NASA camera to capture views of the lunar surface. From its low orbit, Danuri will explore the Moon’s shadowed regions, which could hold water ice.
By launching Danuri, South Korea hopes to advance its lunar exploration, as the orbiter is designed to scope out potential landing spots for future missions to the Moon. South Korea also wants to launch a lander and a rover, in addition to another orbiter, for the second phase of the mission.
More: Chinese Mission to Pluck Samples from Moon’s Far Side Just Got More Interesting
The HAARP facility’s antenna array includes 180 antennas spread across 33 acres.Photo: HAARP
A group of researchers is attempting to bounce radio signals off a 500-foot-wide asteroid during its close flyby of Earth on Tuesday.
The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is aiming its antennas at asteroid 2010 XC15, a space rock that’s categorized as a near-Earth potentially hazardous asteroid. The effort is a test run to to prepare for a larger object, known as Apophis, that will have a close encounter with our planet in 2029.
“What’s new and what we are trying to do is probe asteroid interiors with long wavelength radars and radio telescopes from the ground,” Mark Haynes, lead investigator on the project and a radar systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. “Longer wavelengths can penetrate the interior of an object much better than the radio wavelengths used for communication.”
HAARP is a research facility in Gakona, Alaska (one that’s been the subject of plenty of conspiracy theories). It’s made up of 180 high-frequency antennas, each standing at 72 feet tall and stretched across 33 acres. The facility transmits radio beams toward the ionosphere, the ionized part of the atmosphere that’s located about 50 to 400 miles (80 to 600 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. HAARP sends radio signals to the ionosphere and waits to see how they return, in an effort to measure the disturbances caused by the Sun, among other things.
The facility launched a science campaign in October with 13 experiments, including one that involved bouncing signals off the Moon. At the time, HAARP researchers were considering sending a radio signal to an asteroid to investigate the interior of the rocky body.
During today’s experiment, the HAARP antennas in Alaska will transmit the radio signals to the asteroid, and then scientists will check if the reflected signals arrive at antenna arrays at the University of New Mexico Long Wavelength Array and California’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array.
HAARP will transmit a continually chirping signal at slightly above and below 9.6 megahertz; the chirp will repeat at two-second intervals. At its closest approach on December 27, the asteroid will be twice as far as the Moon is from Earth.
Tuesday’s experiment is to prepare for an upcoming encounter with an asteroid in 2029. That potentially hazardous asteroid, formally known as 99942 Apophis, is around 1,210 feet (370 meters) wide, and it will come to within 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) of Earth on April 13, 2029. The near-Earth object was thought to pose a slight risk to Earth in 2068, but NASA ruled that out.
Still, HAARP wants to probe the asteroid to prepare for potential risks in the future from space rocks. “The more time there is before a potential impact, the more options there are to try to deflect it,” Haynes said.
In September, NASA’s DART spacecraft smacked into a small asteroid and successfully altered its orbit. Such a strategy could be one way to divert a space rock that threatens Earth.
Today’s test shows the potential of using long wavelength radio signals to probe the interiors of asteroids. “If we can get the ground-based systems up and running, then that will give us a lot of chances to try to do interior sensing of these objects,” Haynes said.
More: A Powerful Recoil Effect Magnified NASA’s Asteroid Deflection Experiment
Astrophysicists on Earth are no strangers to WASP-39b, an exoplanet orbiting a star about 700 light-years from Earth, though they’ve never actually seen it directly. Now, the Webb Space Telescope has offered fresh insight into this distant world: Its observations have revealed the recipe list for the planet’s toxic atmosphere.
WASP-39b is a gas giant about the mass of Saturn and the size of Jupiter, but it orbits its star at about the same distance as Mercury is from the Sun, making the exoplanet very, very hot. The exoplanet was discovered in 2011; earlier this year, Webb telescope observations revealed carbon dioxide lurking in its atmosphere.
More molecules and chemical compounds have now been indentified, including evidence of water, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium. The findings are under review for publication and currently available on the preprint server arXiv.
“This is the first time we have seen concrete evidence of photochemistry — chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light — on exoplanets,” said Shang-Min Tsai, a researcher at the University of Oxford lead author of the paper explaining sulfur dioxide’s presence in the planet’s atmosphere, in a European Space Agency release. “I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres with [this mission].”
It’s no small feat to sniff out the chemicals floating in the atmosphere of a distant world. The nearest confirmed exoplanet is 24.9 trillion miles away. Yet Webb managed to spot such infinitesimal molecules in WASP-39b.
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Webb observed the planet by waiting for it to transit in front of its host star; when it did, the star’s light illuminated the planet from behind. Webb picked up infrared wavelengths of that light, and scientists can deduce which chemicals are present in the atmosphere based on the wavelengths of light they absorbed.
Webb’s capabilities have broader implications for understanding the diversity of exoplanets in our galaxy, with an eye toward their potential habitability. With its extreme heat and gaseous composition, WASP-39b is certainly not hospitable to any life we know of—but it’s showcasing the kind of molecular-level analysis Webb can apply to distant worlds.
“I am looking forward to seeing what we find in the atmospheres of small, terrestrial planets,” said Mercedes López-Morales, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and a co-author of the recent work, in the ESA release.
The data suggested to the researchers that the chemicals in the planet’s atmosphere may be broken up in clouds, rather than evenly distributed in its atmosphere. And based on the relative abundances of the chemicals in the atmosphere, the researchers think that WASP-39b emerged from a glomming together of planetesimals over time.
While we don’t know where Webb will turn its infrared gaze next, we know that, at some point, more exoplanets will be on the docket. Webb has already investigated the atmospheres of rocky planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, and may return to the system in due time. You can keep up with Webb’s most recent targets here.
More: Webb Telescope Brings a Once-Fuzzy Galaxy Into Focus
Artist’s depiction of the VERITAS Venus mission.Image: NASA/JPL
NASA’s JPL is struggling with issues related to budget, staffing, and poor communications, forcing the space agency to delay a highly anticipated mission to Venus.
During the annual meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group on Monday, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division Lori Glaze described the mission delay as “the most painful thing I’ve ever had to do probably in my whole life.” However, Glaze said that in trying to address challenges highlighted by an independent review board, “there were zero good options.”
NASA recently shared the results of an independent review board that was put together to decide the fate of the Psyche mission. The mission had missed its initial launch window in August 2022 due to development delays, but is now targeting a launch date in October 2023 to study a metal-rich asteroid. However, the report put together by the review board revealed issues that went far beyond the ones that led to the delay of Psyche.
An illustration of the Psyche mission, which is set to launch in 2023. Illustration: NASA
The independent review board noted that there were not enough staff members working on Psyche to allow for its completion on time, in addition to communication issues and staff members working remotely due to the covid-19 pandemic. The board also noted an unprecedented workload and an imbalance between workload and available resources at JPL.
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As a result of these issues, NASA decided to delay the launch of its VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) probe for at least three years. “This is a bitter, bitter blow for the VERITAS team in particular, and the Venus community more broadly,” Planetary Scientist Paul Byrne told Gizmodo in an email. “I’m very disappointed.”
VERITAS was originally scheduled to launch in 2027 on a mission to map the surface of Venus and study its atmosphere. Its delay to 2031 is meant to allow for staff working on VERITAS to contribute to missions that are further along in their development and free up additional resources for the Psyche mission.
Glaze also cited the impact of covid-19 and the ongoing inflation crisis, saying NASA did not receive any additional funding to offset the financial effects of the past two years. “I just wanted to make a note that we’re accommodating a lower budget right now than we anticipated,” Glaze said.
To which she added: “And so every single project that’s getting ready to start building hardware is saying we need to have the money that’s in our budgets out in that year. We need it now so that we can go ahead and begin these early procurements. And so we’re trying to accommodate that as well.”
Members of the Venus science community were frustrated by the decision, especially considering how long they had to wait for a NASA mission to advance Venus science. NASA’s last mission to Venus, Magellan, arrived at the planet in 1989 and concluded science operations in 1994. Since then, NASA hasn’t sent out a specialized Venus mission. But much to the delight of scientists studying Venus, NASA green-lit two Venus missions, VERITAS and DAVINCI, in June of last year. DAVINCI is still on track to launch in 2029, but VERITAS wasn’t as lucky.
“A delay of three years isn’t much in the scheme of NASA’s frequency of Venus missions, but the data VERITAS will return are badly needed—so having to wait for even longer, especially through no fault of the VERITAS team—feels very unfair,” Byrne said.
VERITAS team members who were present at the meeting expressed frustration at having to bear the brunt of the budget and workforce issues when they’ve not gone over budget or have any issues with staffing. “I recognize that you are not responsible for the things that are going to be assessed, that’s out of your control,” Glaze said while addressing a member of the VERITAS team. “I can make a commitment to you and your team to be transparent and to work with you.”
The science team at VERITAS will be reassigned to other missions before they resume work on the mission to Venus later on. “We are going to provide some level of support throughout the stand down for the science team to continue meeting, continue talking, continue thinking towards how we go forward in the 2024 timeframe,” Glaze said.
There will also be an assessment of the progress made at JPL towards resolving the issues noted in the report, as well as progress made for two upcoming missions, NASA’s Europa Clipper and NISAR, which are scheduled for launch in 2024. “If they are not sufficiently staffed and they miss their launch window, the funding implications of that would be, I would go so far as to say, almost catastrophic,” Glaze said.
The Psyche mission is designed to reveal the origins of a 140-mile-wide (226-kilometer) asteroid, but its delay has already revealed more than NASA had anticipated. “I had heard that there were serious staffing issues at JPL, but that’s true of many places because of the covid-19 pandemic and other issues,” Byrne said. “But I had no idea just how bad things were.”
More:NASA Lacks Plan for Ditching Space Station in an Emergency
The Lucy spacecraft captured this image of Earth on October 15. Image: NASA
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft got its first view of the Earth-Moon system one year after launching from its home planet to explore a distant swarm of asteroids. The spacecraft captured beautiful, and somewhat daunting, images of Earth and its natural satellite as it whizzed past for a gravitational assist.
The Lucy spacecraft is currently on a six-year journey to Jupiter to study the Trojan asteroids, two groups of rocky bodies that lead and follow Jupiter as it orbits the Sun.
As part of its convoluted journey, Lucy flew by Earth on October 15 for the first of three gravity assist maneuvers to place the spacecraft on a new trajectory beyond the orbit of Mars. During its flyby, Lucy took a few photos of Earth and the Moon to calibrate the spacecraft’s instruments. NASA released the images this week—and they’re really great, if not a bit goosebump-inducing. What’s more, they’re a sneak preview into the capabilities of the spacecraft and the kinds of views can expect of the Trojan asteroids.
Image: NASA
The first image was taken on October 13, when Lucy was 890,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) away from Earth. The spacecraft was still making its way towards our planet for the close flyby and was able to capture the Earth-Moon system in the same frame.
The Moon can be seen very faintly along the left side of the image, separated from its host planet by about 238,900 miles (384,400 kilometers). This view of the distant pair defies our perception of the Moon that we see in our night skies, which appears relatively close to us. Instead, the image reveals how far the Moon really is from Earth, and the eerie darkness of space between them.
Image: NASA
As Lucy got closer to Earth, it captured this closer look at the planet on October 15 at a distance of 385,000 miles (620,000 kilometers). This view of the Earth shows Hadar, Ethiopia—the place of origin for the 3.2 million-year-old hominid fossil that the spacecraft was named after.
The Lucy fossils provided valuable insights into human evolution, the same way the Trojan asteroids could help scientists piece together the origin story of the early solar system and how it evolved over time.
Image: NASA
Roughly eight hours after it flew past Earth, Lucy got snugly with the Moon. The spacecraft captured this closeup image of the lunar surface on October 16 at a distance of around 140,000 miles (230,000 km) from the surface.
The image, taken with Lucy’s L’LORRI (Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager) high-resolution greyscale camera, was put together by combining ten separate two millisecond exposures of the same frame to increase its quality, with each pixel representing about 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers).
Image: NASA
This mosaic of the Moon was created from five separate one millisecond exposures, with each pixel representing about 0.7 miles (1.2 kilometers). The uppermost area of the image was taken at an earlier time than the bottom, resulting in the incongruous view of this lunar area. The image was taken about eight hours after Lucy’s flyby of Earth, when the spacecraft was around 140,000 miles (230,000 km) away from the Moon.
Image: NASA
In another closeup image of the Moon, Lucy observed the side of the lunar surface most familiar to us on Earth. Flying between the Earth and Moon, the spacecraft captured the lava-filled impact basin Mare Imbrium. The lower-right area of the image shows the Apennine mountain range—the landing site for the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.
After Lucy bid farewell to Earth, its new trajectory placed it on a two-year orbit around the Sun. In two years, Lucy will return to Earth for yet another gravity assist. From there, the spacecraft will still have about three years to go before reaching its first target, asteroid Donaldjohanson. Later in August 2027, Lucy will begin its Trojan tour by visiting Eurybates and its binary partner Queta, followed by Polymele and its binary partner, Leucus, Orus, and the binary pair Patroclus and Menoetius.
More: Astronomers Chase Shadows From Jupiter’s Mysterious Trojan Asteroids
Last week, NASA’s DART spacecraft intentionally crashed into Dimorphos, a petite moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. Now, a telescope on the ground in Chile has imaged the massive plume created by the impact in the days following the encounter.
The crash was a planetary defense test; NASA is seeking to know if a kinetic impactor can change the trajectory of an Earth-bound space rock, should we ever spot a large one on a collision course with us. The space agency’s Center for Near Earth Objects exists to monitor the status of these objects and their orbits.
NASA is still sifting through the data of the collision to determine if the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, altered Dimorphos’s orbital trajectory around its larger companion, but images of the impact are coming thick and fast from all the telescopic lenses turned towards the historic event.
The latest images come from the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope in Chile, operated by NOIRLab. The SOAR telescope is located in the foothills of the Andes, an arid environment with clear, light-free skies that make the region ideal for ground-based telescopes.
The expanding dust trail from the collision is clearly visible, stretching to the right corner of the image. According to a NOIRLab release, the debris trail stretches about 6000 miles (10,000 kilometers) from the point of impact. Said Teddy Kareta, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who was involved with the observation, in the release: “It is amazing how clearly we were able to capture the structure and extent of the aftermath in the days following the impact.”
NASA scientists have yet to come out with their determination on DART’s success, but the impact is a success in itself. Soon to come are further findings about the event: exactly how much material from Didymos was expelled, how pulverized the material was, and how fast it may have been kicked up. The data could shed important light on the effect that kinetic impactors might have on “rubble pile” asteroids, which Dimorphos appears to be. Rubble pile asteroids feature loosely bound conglomerations of surface material, which could explain these dramatic post-impact views of the moonlet.
Nearby in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s sky survey will soon begin. Among its charges are assessing potentially hazardous objects near Earth—though considering the recent test, perhaps the asteroids should be worried about us.
More: Ground Telescopes Capture Jaw-Dropping Views of DART Asteroid Impact
This image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows ice sheets at Mars’ south pole. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/JHU
Scientists have been arguing for years about ambiguous radar scans of Mars’ south pole. Do they reveal underground lakes of liquid water? Or something else? Two new papers out this week have added even more intrigue to the controversy.
In 2018, a team of Italian scientists claimed to have discovered a subglacial lake near the Martian south pole using radar data from the Mars Express satellite. The discovery was met with skepticism, with other scientists suggesting alternatives like lumps of clay that could have produced the same reflection patterns. It’s a heady debate, because of water’s implications for life. While most scientists agree that Mars used to be very wet, the H2O it has left seems to be all ice.
The debate is reignited this week with new evidence from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor satellite that supports the liquid water hypothesis. The radar signals from the 2018 study pointed to a 12-mile-wide (20-kilometer) region around a mile beneath the surface, which the researchers interpreted as a subglacial lake or a patch of liquid water. In order to confirm that interpretation, a different team examined satellite data of the surface topography of the same region. Their analysis, published this week in Nature Astronomy, revealed a 6- to 15-mile (10-15 kilometer) undulation that’s made up of a depression and a corresponding raised area, which is similar to undulations found over subglacial lakes here on Earth.
The team then ran a computer simulation of ice flow that’s consistent with the conditions on Mars, and the simulations generated undulations of similar size and shape to those observed on Mars’ ice cap surface. The study suggests that there is indeed an accumulation of liquid water beneath the planet’s south polar ice cap. “The combination of the new topographic evidence, our computer model results, and the radar data make it much more likely that at least one area of subglacial liquid water exists on Mars today,” Neil Arnold, a researcher at Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
But a separate new paper suggests that the liquid water radar data was in fact a result of interaction between different geological layers on Mars, producing a reflection pattern that could have been misinterpreted as liquid water. That study, also published this week in Nature Astronomy, provides an alternative explanation to the 2018 finding. The team behind this study created a simulation of layers made up of four materials—atmosphere, water ice, carbon dioxide ice, and basalt—and measured the layers’ interaction with electromagnetic radiation as it passes through them.
They found that, depending on the thickness of the layers and how far apart they are, they produced similar reflections to the ones observed in the radar data of 2018. “On Earth, reflections that bright are often an indication of liquid water, even buried lakes like Lake Vostok [under the surface of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet],” Dan Lalich, research associate with Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “But on Mars, the prevailing opinion was that it should be too cold for similar lakes to form.”
“None of the work we’ve done disproves the possible existence of liquid water down there,” Lalich added. “We just think the interference hypothesis is more consistent with other observations. I’m not sure anything short of a drill could prove either side of this debate definitively right or wrong.”
Temperatures on Mars can dip to around -220 degrees Fahrenheit (-140 degrees Celsius). Those frigid conditions comprise the main argument against any liquid water flowing on the Red Planet. But the researchers behind the latest pro-water study argue that geothermal heat from within the planet could be enough to keep the water in liquid form.
Water is a main ingredient for life on Earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean our sacred life juice would sprout lifeforms elsewhere in the universe. The debate over water does have implications for future crewed missions to Mars, though, especially if we ever want to set up a sustained presence there.
More: NASA Refines Its Strategy for Getting Humans to Mars
Jupiter will appear larger and brighter than usual Monday night, as it makes its closest approach to Earth since 1963.
Jupiter—a massive, milky-orange gas giant—is the largest planet in our solar system. The strips of color on the planet are swirling gases that churn in huge storm systems. Some of those systems, like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, last for centuries.
The planet’s awesome features will be in sharp relief tonight thanks to the way it orbits the Sun. Both Earth and Jupiter’s orbits are slightly elliptical, meaning that the distance between the two planets varies. And the orbits of the two planets are quite different—a year on Jupiter, or the time it takes to make one trip around the Sun, takes 12 Earth years.
At its greatest distance, Jupiter is about 600 million miles from Earth. But tonight, it will only be 367 million miles from us. Jupiter is on the opposite side of Earth as the Sun tonight, a position called opposition, making the gas giant appear larger and brighter than usual.
Jupiter and its Galilean satellites (top to bottom): Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.Image: NASA/Newsmakers (Getty Images)
According to Adam Kobelski, a research astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the planet’s banding and several of the Galilean moons will be visible with good binoculars. “One of the key needs will be a stable mount for whatever system you use,” Kobelski said in a NASA release.
A 4-inch telescope or larger will be able to pick out specific features on the planet’s face, like the Great Red Spot. If you don’t have a telescope or decent binoculars, Jupiter will still be visible to the naked eye, but you won’t be able to see any details of the planet.
Still, its brightness will be more appreciable than usual thanks to its proximity. No matter how you choose to observe Jupiter, clear weather conditions, high elevations, and a dark sky will help. Though its closest approach will be tonight, Jupiter and its moons will be extra visible for the next few nights, according to a NASA release.
And if you want to see Jupiter in superlative color, you can refer to some recent images by the Webb Space Telescope that captured the planet’s aurorae in infrared.
Jupiter’s moons are also set to get some more attention. NASA’s Europa Clipper mission—slated to launch no earlier than October 2024—will give us our best-yet look at Jupiter’s frozen moon Europa. Scientists believe that a vast, salty ocean lies beneath Europa’s icy crust. The Clipper will map the Moon’s surface and use ice-penetrating radar to peer into the mysterious underworld.
There are exciting missions on the horizon for Jupiter and its satellites, but for the next few nights, we’ll get to appreciate these heavenly bodies from right here on Earth.
More: Scientists Looked at Nine Cyclones Swirling at Jupiter’s North Pole