the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has revealed that Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot extends hundreds of miles into the planet. The storm’s diameter is about 10,000 miles wide and between 186 and 310 miles deep. It is so large that the Juno spacecraft was able to measure the small perturbations in gravity produced by the storm as it passed over. These gravity signals were combined with previous microwave measurements to calculate the depth of the storm. While the storm is deep, it is not nearly as deep as some of the surrounding jet streams which extend up to 1,800 miles into the planet.