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In both the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, Jupiter was named after the chief god of the divine pantheon: Zeus to the Greeks and Jupiter to the Romans. [18] The International Astronomical Union formally adopted the name Jupiter for the planet in 1976 and has since named its newly discovered satellites for the god's lovers, favourites, and descendants. [19]
Planets in the Solar System. According to the IAU definition, there are eight planets in the Solar System, which are (in increasing distance from the Sun): [2] Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Jupiter is the largest, at 318 Earth masses, whereas Mercury is the smallest, at 0.055 Earth masses.
The first spacecraft to explore Jupiter was Pioneer 10, which flew past the planet in December 1973, followed by Pioneer 11 twelve months later. Pioneer 10 obtained the first close-up images of Jupiter and its Galilean moons ; the spacecraft studied the planet's atmosphere, detected its magnetic field , observed its radiation belts and ...
Outline of Jupiter. The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Jupiter: Jupiter – fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a giant planet with a mass one-thousandth that of the Sun, but two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined.
A Close-Up Look at Jupiter's Dynamic Atmosphere: Credit/Provider: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) Short title: Hubble's New Portrait of Jupiter; Image title: Jupiter is the king of the solar system, more massive than all of the other solar-system planets combined.
The rings of Jupiter are a system of faint planetary rings. The Jovian rings were the third ring system to be discovered in the Solar System, after those of Saturn and Uranus. The main ring was discovered in 1979 by the Voyager 1 space probe [1] and the system was more thoroughly investigated in the 1990s by the Galileo orbiter. [2]
The composition of Jupiter's atmosphere is similar to that of the planet as a whole. [2] Jupiter's atmosphere is the most comprehensively understood of those of all the giant planets because it was observed directly by the Galileo atmospheric probe when it entered the Jovian atmosphere on December 7, 1995. [29]
File:Jupiter.jpg. Size of this preview: 600 × 600 pixels. Other resolutions: 240 × 240 pixels | 480 × 480 pixels | 840 × 840 pixels. Original file (840 × 840 pixels, file size: 41 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) English: Original Caption Released with Image: This processed color image of Jupiter was produced in 1990 by the U.S. Geological ...