Did you know a comet once bruised Jupiter? ☄️ #Shorts

30 years ago, the comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, pounded into the southern hemisphere of Jupiter, leaving dark scars in the planet’s atmosphere that persisted for several weeks.

The remarkable event was the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision in the Solar System.

Huge plumes up to 3 thousand kilometres high were created by the impact and raised the atmospheric temperatures to 40,000 degrees Celsius.

Almost 10 years after the collision, our Herschel telescope found conclusive evidence that Shoemaker-Levy 9 was the origin of water found in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Our Juice mission launched last year will map the distribution of Jupiter’s atmospheric ingredients in even greater detail.

This kind of collision was more frequent in the early solar system but today, something as large as Shomaker-Levy impacts Earth only once in a million years.

However, it is important we can protect ourselves from such space hazards which is why we are carrying out several projects dedicated to improving our ability to detect, track and mitigate potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, such as our Hera mission currently planned to launch later this year and our new mission, Ramses, which will to rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis.

📹 ESA – European Space Agency
📸 HA. Weaver, T. ESmith (Space Telescope Science Institute), and NASA/ESA
📸 ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen)
📸 H. Hammel, MIT and NASA/ESA
📸 Calar Alto Observatory/Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany

#ESA #Jupiter #Asteroid

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