
Why Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Refuses to Die - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/why-jupiters-great-red-spot-refuses-to-die
======
sigstoat
> There are tons of data from the Voyager trips collected 31 years ago that
> are still unanalyzed, and getting funding to examine them is very, very
> difficult.

the PIs i dealt with on space missions were usually on to the next piece of
hardware they were going to fling into space before they had the data from the
last one.

and i think the lab i was at had some voyager (or pioneer?) data laying around
that one of the emeritus scientists was talking about getting transferred off
of tape so he could finally look at it.

~~~
QittyQat
Too bad this data can't be opened for hobbyists to review, in the same manner
that hobbyist astronomers assist in discovering new stars.

~~~
staofbur
I had a 50-odd CD set of voyager data dumps from NASA once. Not sure what
happened to them but the data was out there and obtainable.

Edit: turns out you can download at least some of them from archive.org!
[https://archive.org/details/VoyagerstotheOuterPlanetsVol5](https://archive.org/details/VoyagerstotheOuterPlanetsVol5)

------
nsxwolf
I'm glad it is still there. It's such an interesting feature.

------
gardano
Here's one thing that has bugged me for a while. Why is it said that the great
red spot is around 500 years old? How do we know that it hasn't been around
for much longer?

Do we have before/after evidence that at one point it didn't exist, and then
around 500 years ago it existed?

~~~
Turing_Machine
In fact we don't even know that it's been there for 500 years. It's only been
continuously observed for 187 years.

While there were earlier observations of large spots on Jupiter, it's not 100%
certain they were actually the same storm.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Red_Spot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Red_Spot)

To extend, a series of disjoint astronomical observations of the Earth would
likely show a hurricane/cyclone/typhoon _somewhere_ , but it wouldn't
necessarily follow that they were all the same one.

