Welcome to our Solar / Planetary Walk which has been established in memorial to Alfred Piff, a longtime member of MBG and supporter of education for all. As you travel along the walk, you will experience the scale model of our solar neighborhood. Our walk is approximately .79 miles, and each planet is marked by Planetary Art Posts created by Nancy Thomas. Scanning the QR at each post will give access to information about each planet. Enjoy your walk!
Planet JUPITER
With over 300 times the mass of Earth, Jupiter is the largest planet and is named for the king of the Roman gods. It has no actual surface, just increasingly dense layers of gas and liquid hydrogen, helium, methane, and ammonia compounds. Its Great Red Spot is a hurricane-like storm three times the diame-ter of Earth. Jupiter spins very fast (just under 10 hours) so looks striped and generates a huge magnetic field. It also has the most moons, including Io (which has many volcanoes), Europa (it has the possibility of life in its ice-covered ocean), and Ganymede (the largest moon in the entire solar system). Gravity at Jupiter’s cloudtops is 2.53 g’s.
DIAMETER: 88,844 miles
DISTANCE FROM SUN: 5.2 AU = 484 million miles = 43 light minutes
ROTATION: 9.8 hours
REVOLUTION AROUND ORBIT: 29.5 years
MOONS: Europa, Io, Ganymede, Callisto, plus many others
NAMED FOR: Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods
Some Fun Facts - Did you know?
Different bands of clouds rotate at different speeds on Jupiter. The Great Red Spot is a long-lived storm. NASA/Hubble.
In this false color image, it’s easy to see several of Jupiter’s moons and their shadows. In 1610. Galileo Galilei was the first to see Jupiter’s four largest moons with a brand new invention: the telescope. (eclipses) on the planet. NASA/Hubble
The black spots left when Comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter in 1997 are bigger than the Earth. NASA/Hubble
