Jupiter's monster storm not just wide but surprisingly deep
CTV
Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a storm so big it could swallow Earth, extends surprisingly deep beneath the planet's cloud tops, scientists reported Thursday.
NASA's Juno spacecraft has discovered that the monster storm, though shrinking, still has a depth of between 200 miles (350 kilometers) and 300 miles or so (500 kilometers.) When combined with its width of 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers), the Great Red Spot resembles a fat pancake in new 3D images of the planet.
The mission's lead scientist, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute, said there might not be a hard cutoff at the bottom of the storm.
"It probably fades out gradually and keeps going down," Bolton said at a news conference.
The research was published Thursday in the journal Science.
