New Red Spot Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/02....htm?list771283

[elakdawalla]

I've been trying to track down the origin of that storm too. Jupiter is hard because no cloud features stay put -- stuff at different latitudes shifts with respect to each other with timescales measured in days, and stuff at different longitudes but the same latitude shifts on slightly longer timescales.

According to some image captions on Photojournal the three white ovals first formed in the 1930s.

Here's the Voyager 1 view, from July 1979. You can see three large white ovals of roughly equal size in the band just south of the Great Red Spot. One is just below the spot, the other two are some distance away.

Here's an early Hubble view from May 1991, with just one of the spots showing up. And here's a very low resolution set from Hubble in July 1994, where you can barely make out the positions of the white spots. They're much closer together than they were in 1979.

Here's a Hubble view from February 1995. Three white ovals are now immediately adjacent. The caption says that the outer two white spots are ones that formed in the 1930s. What's the center one then? This caption also refers to another view from seven months earlier -- I haven't tracked that one down yet. There's a second image on the Hubble site, but there's no caption information saying when it was taken.

Galileo was in position to witness their merger in February 1998 but was of course only able to return tight views. Here are two Galileo views from February 1997 and September 1998. It says that two of the storms were called BC and DE after they formed. What was the third one called? What's the significance of these names? There's a whole bunch more of the February 1997 views here, here, here, here, and here...and 13 more...as well as a blinky movie.

Here's the Cassini view, from October 2000. You see just the one oval, roughly 150 degrees of longitude away from the Great Red Spot. So, yes, ugordan, that's the progenitor to Little Red.

--Emily