Oct. 17, 2012 Jupiter, the mythical god of sky and thunder,
would certainly be pleased at all the changes afoot at his
namesake planet. As the planet gets peppered continually with
small space rocks, wide belts of the atmosphere are changing
color, hotspots are vanishing and reappearing, and clouds are
gathering over one part of Jupiter, while dissipating over
another. The results were presented today (Oct. 17) by Glenn
Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., at the American Astronomical
Society's Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting in Reno, Nev.
"The changes we're seeing in Jupiter are global in scale," Orton
said. "We've seen some of these before, but never with modern
instrumentation to clue us in on what's going on. Other changes
haven't been seen in decades, and some regions have never been
in the state they're appearing in now. At the same time, we've
never seen so many things striking Jupiter. Right now, we're
trying to figure out why this is all ha