NASA Solves Jupiter's Water Mystery

Recently NASA scientists have discovered that planet Jupiter contains water in its atmosphere, though in a tiny amount. As per a statement on NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website, almost 0.25 per cent of Jupiter's atmosphere consists of water, specifically nearby the equatorial regions.

"We found the water in the equator to be greater than what the Galileo probe measured," said Cheng Li, a scientist involved with the Juno mission, from the University of California.

"Because the equatorial region is very unique at Jupiter, we need to compare these results with how much water is in other regions," Cheng Li further added.

Since decades, scientists have been trying hard to know about Jupiter's water content and this mystery "represents a critical missing piece to the puzzle of our solar system's formation."

This discovery which got published in the Nature Astronomy journal was derived based on the data delivered by the Juno space probe launched in 2011 and that entered Jupiter's orbit in 2016.

Juno's primary investigator Scott Bolton said in the NASA article that "Juno's surprise discovery that the atmosphere was not well mixed even below the cloud tops is a puzzle that we are still trying to figure out. No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet."

The specific number was reached from the information gathered out of Juno's eight flybys around the planet.