How long does it take to get to Jupiter from earth? How far is Saturn from us? Distance from Earth to Saturn

Besides the Sun, the planet Jupiter is indeed the largest in size and mass in our solar system; it is not without reason that it is named after the main and most powerful god of the ancient pantheon - Jupiter in the Roman tradition (aka Zeus, in the Greek tradition). Also, the planet Jupiter is fraught with many mysteries and has been mentioned more than once on the pages of our scientific website. In today’s article we will collect all the information about this interesting giant planet together, so, forward to Jupiter.

Who discovered Jupiter

But first, a little history of the discovery of Jupiter. In fact, the Babylonian priests and part-time astronomers of the ancient world were already well aware of Jupiter; it was in their works that there were the first mentions of this giant in history. The thing is that Jupiter is so large that it could always be seen in the starry sky with the naked eye.

The famous astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first to study the planet Jupiter through a telescope, and he also discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter. At that time, the discovery of Jupiter's moons was an important argument in favor of Copernicus' heliocentric model (that the center of the celestial system is, and not the Earth). And the great scientist himself suffered persecution by the Inquisition for his revolutionary discoveries at that time, but that’s another story.

Subsequently, many astronomers looked at Jupiter through their telescopes, making various interesting discoveries, for example, the astronomer Cassini discovered a large red spot on the surface of the planet (we will write more about it below) and also calculated the rotation period and differential rotation of the atmosphere of Jupiter. Astronomer E. Bernard discovered the last satellite of Jupiter, Amatheus. Observations of Jupiter using increasingly powerful telescopes continue to this day.

Features of the planet Jupiter

If we compare Jupiter with our planet, then the size of Jupiter is 317 times larger than the size of the Earth. In addition, Jupiter is 2.5 times larger than all other planets in the solar system combined. As for the mass of Jupiter, it is 318 times greater than the mass of the Earth and 2.5 times greater than the mass of all other planets in the solar system combined. Jupiter's mass is 1.9 x 10*27.

Temperature of Jupiter

What is the temperature on Jupiter during the day and at night? Considering the great distance of the planet from the Sun, it is logical to assume that it is cold on Jupiter, but not everything is so simple. The outer atmosphere of the giant is indeed quite cold, the temperature there is approximately -145 degrees C, but as you move several hundred kilometers deeper into the planet it becomes warmer. And not just warmer, but simply hot, since on the surface of Jupiter the temperature can reach up to +153 C. Such a strong temperature difference is due to the fact that the surface of the planet consists of burning, releasing heat. Moreover, the planet's molten interior releases even more heat than Jupiter itself receives from the Sun.

All this is complemented by the strongest storms raging on the planet (wind speeds reach 600 km per hour), which mix the heat emanating from the hydrogen component of Jupiter with the cold air of the atmosphere.

Is there life on Jupiter

As you can see, the physical conditions on Jupiter are very harsh, so given the lack of a solid surface, high atmospheric pressure and high temperature on the very surface of the planet, life on Jupiter is not possible.

Atmosphere of Jupiter

The atmosphere of Jupiter is huge, as is Jupiter itself. The chemical composition of Jupiter's atmosphere is 90% hydrogen and 10% helium; the atmosphere also includes some other chemical elements: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide. And since Jupiter is a gas giant without a solid surface, there is no boundary between its atmosphere and the surface itself.

But if we began to descend deeper into the bowels of the planet, we would notice changes in the density and temperature of hydrogen and helium. Based on these changes, scientists have identified such parts of the planet's atmosphere as the troposphere, stratosphere, thermosphere and exosphere.

Why Jupiter is not a star

Readers may have noticed that in its composition, and especially in the predominance of hydrogen and helium, Jupiter is very similar to the Sun. In this regard, the question arises why Jupiter is still a planet and not a star. The fact is that he simply did not have enough mass and heat to begin the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium. According to scientists, Jupiter needs to increase its current mass by 80 times in order to begin thermonuclear reactions that occur on the Sun and other stars.

Photo of the planet Jupiter

Surface of Jupiter

Due to the absence of a solid surface on the giant planet, scientists took the lowest point in its atmosphere, where the pressure is 1 bar, as a certain conventional surface. Various chemical elements that make up the planet's atmosphere contribute to the formation of the colorful clouds of Jupiter that we can observe in a telescope. It is ammonia clouds that are responsible for the red-and-white striped color of the planet Jupiter.

Great Red Spot on Jupiter

If you carefully examine the surface of the giant planets, you will definitely notice the characteristic large red spot, which was first noticed by the astronomer Cassini while observing Jupiter in the late 1600s. What is this great red spot of Jupiter? According to scientists, this is a large atmospheric storm, so large that it has been raging in the southern hemisphere of the planet for more than 400 years, and possibly longer (considering that it could have arisen long before Cassini saw it).

Although recently, astronomers have noticed that the storm has begun to subside slowly, as the size of the spot began to shrink. According to one hypothesis, the great red spot will take a circular shape by 2040, but how long it will last is unknown.

Age of Jupiter

At the moment, the exact age of the planet Jupiter is unknown. The difficulty in determining it is that scientists do not yet know how Jupiter was formed. According to one hypothesis, Jupiter, like other planets, was formed from the solar nebula about 4.6 billion years ago, but this is just a hypothesis.

Rings of Jupiter

Yes, Jupiter, like any decent giant planet, has rings. Of course, they are not as large and noticeable as those of his neighbor. Jupiter's rings are thinner and weaker; most likely they consist of substances ejected by the giant's satellites during collisions with wandering asteroids and.

Moons of Jupiter

Jupiter has as many as 67 satellites, essentially more than all other planets in the solar system. The satellites of Jupiter are of great interest to scientists, as among them there are such large specimens that their size exceeds some small planets (like “not planets”), which also have significant reserves of groundwater.

Rotation of Jupiter

One year on Jupiter lasts 11.86 Earth years. It is during this period of time that Jupiter makes one revolution around the Sun. The speed of the planet Jupiter's orbit is 13 km per second. Jupiter's orbit is slightly tilted (about 6.09 degrees) compared to the plane of the ecliptic.

How long does it take to fly to Jupiter?

How long is the flight to Jupiter from Earth? When Earth and Jupiter are closest to each other, they are 628 million kilometers apart. How long will it take modern spaceships to cover this distance? Launched by NASA back in 1979, the Voyager 1 research shuttle took 546 days to fly to Jupiter. For Voyager 2, a similar flight took 688 days.

• Despite its truly gigantic size, Jupiter is also the fastest planet in the solar system in terms of rotation around its axis, so to make one revolution around its axis it will take only 10 of our hours, so a day on Jupiter is equal to 10 hours.
• Clouds on Jupiter can be up to 10 km thick.
• Jupiter has an intense magnetic field that is 16 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field.
• It is quite possible to see Jupiter with your own eyes, and most likely you have seen it more than once, you just didn’t know that it was Jupiter. If you see a large and bright star in the starry night sky, then most likely it is him.

Planet Jupiter, video

And finally, an interesting documentary about Jupiter.

In the section on the question how many years it takes to fly to Jupiter asked by the author Yoasha ---- the best answer is Space probes travel within one year (13-14 months).

Answer from Vadim Kolosov[guru]
look at the distance and divide by the speed of the rocket.

Answer from Simple-minded[guru]
Depends on the relative positions of the planets. And so I reached new horizons in a little more than a year.

Answer from Adaptability[guru]
If you fly fast, you will reach quickly, but if you fly slowly, it will take a very long time.

Answer from Vova Sotnikov[guru]
Because both planets orbit the Sun in an elliptical orbit, the distance from Earth to Jupiter is constantly changing. When the two planets are at their closest distance to each other, the distance to Jupiter is only 365 million miles (about 588 million kilometers). At its closest point to us, Jupiter shines so brightly that even Venus dims in comparison. At its extreme position towards our Earth, the planet Jupiter lies 601,000,000 miles (968,000,000 km) away.
Jupiter takes about 11.86 Earth years to complete one full revolution around the Sun. The Earth revolves around the Sun and catches up with Jupiter every 398.9 days, so we can say that Jupiter lags behind us.
The time required for spacecraft to reach the giant planet depends on a number of things. The Galileo spacecraft was launched in October 1989. Just over six years passed before the spacecraft reached the gas giant, arriving in December 1995. But the ship took a roundabout route and traveled 2.5 billion miles. He traveled around Venus, Earth and the asteroid Gaspra to reach Jupiter.
Voyager 1, on the other hand, took only two years to reach the planet Jupiter. Launched on September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 reached the planet on March 5, 1979. This is because the Voyager mission was designed specifically to study gas giants.

When a person is going to drive his own car to an unfamiliar city, the first thing he does is find out the distance to it in order to estimate the travel time and stock up on gasoline. The distance traveled on the road will not depend on whether you go on the road in the morning or in the evening, today or in a couple of months. With space travel, the situation is somewhat more complicated and the distance to Jupiter, measured yesterday, in six months will turn out to be one and a half times greater, and then will begin to decrease again. On Earth, it would be very inconvenient to travel to a city that itself is constantly moving.

The average distance from our planet to the gas giant is 778.57 million km, but this figure is about as relevant as information about the average temperature in a hospital. The fact is that both planets move around the Sun (or, more precisely, around the center of mass of the Solar System) in elliptical orbits, and with different orbital periods. For Earth it is equal to one year, and for Jupiter it is almost 12 years (11.86 years). The minimum possible distance between them is 588.5 million km, and the maximum is 968.6 million km. The planets seem to be riding on a swing, now approaching, now moving away.

The Earth moves at a higher orbital speed than Jupiter: 29.78 km/s versus 13.07 km/s, and is significantly closer to the center of the solar system, and therefore catches up with it every 398.9 days, coming closer. Taking into account the ellipticity of the motion trajectories, there are points in outer space where the distance between the planets becomes almost minimal. For the Earth-Jupiter pair, the period of time through which they regularly approach each other in this way is about 12 years.

Great Controversies

Such moments in time are usually called dates of great confrontations. These days, Jupiter surpasses all celestial objects in the starry sky in its brightness, approaching the glow of Venus, and with the help of a small telescope or binoculars it becomes possible to observe not only the planet itself, but even its satellites. Therefore, astronomers and simply connoisseurs of the beauty of the starry sky are looking forward to oppositions in order to take a closer look at a distant and little-studied cosmic body and maybe even discover something hitherto unknown to science.

The next unique opportunity to observe Jupiter in the most comfortable conditions for an earthly observer will present itself in the last ten days of September 2022. At such moments on the surface of the planet, using a small telescope, you can clearly see the famous Red Spot, stripes on the disk of the celestial body, various vortex flows in them, and much more. Anyone who has looked through a telescope at this intriguing planet once in his life will strive to do it again and again.

Fly later to arrive earlier

Inside the Great Red Spot

Knowing the kinematics of planetary motion and the planned speed of the spacecraft, you can choose the optimal launch date for the launch vehicle in order to fly to Jupiter as quickly as possible, using less fuel. To be more precise, it is not the interplanetary station that flies to the celestial body, but the two of them moving towards the meeting place, only the route of the planet has remained unchanged for thousands of years, and the trajectory of the aircraft can be chosen. There are options when a vehicle that takes off later will be able to reach the target earlier, so in order to realize them, they strive to build a rocket by the date suitable for launch. There are cases when it is more profitable to fly longer, but then use a “free” source of energy during acceleration and maneuvers - the gravitational attraction of other planets.

Planet exploration

Eight space missions have already taken part in the study of Jupiter, and the ninth, Juno, is underway. The start date of each of them was chosen taking into account the chosen route.

Thus, the Galileo orbital station, before becoming an artificial satellite of Jupiter, spent more than six years on the road, but managed to visit Venus and a couple of asteroids, and also fly past the Earth twice.

But the New Horizons spacecraft reached the gas giant in just 13 months, since its main target is much further away - Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

1. This is a completely new frame: The image was taken by Juno in 2018, and then carefully processed on Earth by scientists Gerald Eichstad and Sain Doran. The photo was taken during the 13th flyby around the planet at a distance of 15,500 kilometers from the top of the clouds.

2. And this image was transmitted by Juno to Earth a little earlier - in December 2017, during the 10th flyby around the planet. It took specialists about a month to study and process the resulting photographs.

3. Juno is approaching Jupiter and transmits new images approximately every 53 days, and moves at speeds of up to 209,000 kilometers per hour.

4. On July 10, 2017, the Juno spacecraft captured this image on its 7th flyby at a distance of 13,917 kilometers. The image of the Great Red Spot was processed by Bjorn Jonsson: this is the largest atmospheric vortex in the Solar System, which has always attracted special attention from researchers. Speed winds inside the spot are more than 500 kilometers per hour.

5. The image of the Little Red Spot was taken in February 2017 during a Juno flyby at a distance of 14,500 kilometers.

6. Another achievement of the Juno apparatus, the image was taken in July 2017. Of course, it is worth paying tribute to the specialists involved in processing visual data. But, nevertheless, it cannot be denied: the processes occurring in the atmosphere of Jupiter truly amazing with its beauty.

7. And this amazing photo was received by Juno in May 2017. Specialists had to work hard to process the raw data and turn it into a work of art. In the image the famous string of pearls is clearly visible, formed by several storms in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

8. Finally, let us remind you that it was not only the Juno spacecraft that managed to surprise earthlings with images of the gas giant. In 2000, the Cassini interplanetary station, launched into space to study Saturn, flew past Jupiter, transmitting images of the planet to Earth. This photo is one of those.

Saturn is the sixth planet of the solar system. The second largest, and its density is so low that if you fill a huge tank with water and place Saturn there, it will float freely on the surface without being completely submerged in water. The main attraction of Saturn is its rings, consisting of dust, gas and ice. A huge number of rings surround the planet, the diameter of which is several times greater than the diameter of the Earth.

What is Saturn like?

First you need to figure out what kind of planet this is and what it is “eaten with”. Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun, named after the ancient Roman Greeks called it Kronos, the father of Zeus (Jupiter). At the farthest point of the orbit (aphelion), the distance from the star is 1,513 billion km.

A planetary day is only 10 hours and 34 minutes, but a planetary year lasts 29.5 Earth years. The atmosphere of the gas giant consists mainly of hydrogen (it accounts for 92%). The remaining 8% comes from impurities of helium, methane, ammonia, ethane, etc.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 reached the orbit of Saturn a couple of years ago and provided scientists with invaluable information about this planet. Winds whose speed reached 500 m/s were observed on the surface. For example, the strongest wind on Earth reached only 103 m/s (New Hampshire,

Just like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, there is a Great White Oval on Saturn. But the second appears only every 30 years, and its last appearance was in 1990. In a couple of years we will be able to watch him again.

Size ratio of Saturn and Earth

How many times is Saturn larger than Earth? According to some data, Saturn is 10 times larger than our planet in diameter alone. By volume 764 times, i.e. Saturn can accommodate exactly this number of our planets. The width of Saturn's rings exceeds the diameter of our blue planet by 6 times. He is so gigantic.

Distance from Earth to Saturn

First, you need to take into account the fact that all the planets of the solar system do not move in circles, but in ellipses (ovals). There come moments when the distance from the Sun changes. It can get closer, it can move away. On Earth this is clearly visible. This is called the change of seasons. But the rotation and inclination of our planet relative to its orbit plays a role here.

Consequently, the distance from Earth to Saturn will vary significantly. Now you will find out how much. Using scientific measurements, it has been calculated that the minimum distance from Earth to Saturn in kilometers is 1195 million, while the maximum is 1660 million.

As you know, the speed of light (according to Einstein’s theory of relativity) is an insurmountable limit in the Universe. He seems unattainable to us. But on a cosmic scale it is negligible. In 8 minutes, light travels the distance to the Earth, which is 150 million km (1 AU). The distance to Saturn has to be covered in 1 hour and 20 minutes. It's not that long, you might say, but just think about the speed of light being 300,000 m/s!

If you take a rocket as a means of transportation, it will take years to cover the distance. Spacecraft aimed at studying the giant planets took from 2.5 to 3 years. At the moment they are outside the solar system. Many scientists believe that the distance from Earth to Saturn can be covered in 6 years and 9 months.

What awaits a person near Saturn?

Why do we even need this hydrogen planet, where life would never originate? Saturn interests scientists with its moon called Titan. The largest satellite of Saturn and the second largest in the Solar System (after Ganymede near Jupiter). Scientists were no less interested in it than Mars. Titan is larger than Mercury and even has rivers on its surface. True, the rivers are made of ethane.

The gravitational force on the satellite is less than on Earth. The main element present in the atmosphere is hydrocarbon. If we manage to get to Titan, this will be a very pressing problem for us. But you won’t need tight spacesuits. Only very warm clothes and an oxygen cylinder. Given the density and gravity of Titan, we can say with great confidence that a person will be able to fly. The fact is that in such conditions our body can freely float in the air, without strong resistance from gravity. We only need ordinary model wings. And even if they break down, a person will be able to gently “saddle” the hard surface of the satellite without any problems.

For the successful settlement of Titan, it will be necessary to build entire cities under hemispherical domes. Only then will it be possible to recreate a climate similar to the earth’s for more comfortable living and growing the necessary food products, as well as the extraction of valuable mineral resources from the bowels of the planet.

The lack of sunlight will also be an acute problem, because the Sun near Saturn seems small. A replacement for solar batteries will be hydrocarbons, which cover the planet in abundance with entire seas. The first colonizers will receive energy from it. Water is found deep below the moon's surface in the form of ice.