Jupiter water clouds

The water clouds are found deepest. Generally the cloud layers in the atmosphere of Saturn are deeper than in Jupiter s atmosphere because of the lower temperature on Saturn. 

Jupiter and Uranus are outer planets composed mainly of gases. Jupiter s atmosphere contains reddish-brown clouds of ammonia. Uranus has an atmosphere made up mainly of hydrogen and helium with clouds of water vapor. This combination looks greenish to an outside observer. In addition, Mars has an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide, and Venus has a permanent cloud cover of sulfur dioxide that appears pale yellow to an observer. Mercury has no permanent atmosphere. Saturn has 1 km thick dust and ice rings that orbit the planet. The eight planets in our solar system are diverse, each having different chemical compositions within and surrounding the planets. Out Earth is by far the friendliest planet for human existence. 

One can readily envisage a time, tens of billions of years from now, after the Sun has bloomed as a red giant and then died, after radiative cooling has permitted large fractions of Jupiter and Saturn to condense as liquid oceans, when most of the Solar System s planetary mass - or far more than now - finally has become habitable. These will be chemically active domains where peculiar forms of liquid water and no doubt some organic substances will be stable (Fig. 4.4) who can say what life may arise there, hundreds to thousands of kilometers below their cloud-capped atmospheric surfaces ... 

Although the basic chemical and material building blocks for the planets and their satellites were fairly uniform during the initial formation of the solar nebula from inter-stellar cloud materials, chemical differentiation, and segregation occurred over time during accretion of the planets, and their moons such that the volatile chemical components of the solar nebula ended up as present day near-surface ice on Earth, and ice plus solid CO2 on Mars, and as ice and other molecular solids and fluids (such as hydrocarbons and ammonia) on most of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and as water ices and increasingly volatile species such as nitrogen in the outermost solar system. 

Jupiter s general characteristics have been well known for some time. Unlike the inner planets, it has no distinct dividing line he tween an outer atmosphere and an inner core, mantle, and crust. Instead, Jupiter consists of elements, compounds, and other chemical species that are normally gaseous hut that may occur as liquids or solids the closer they are to the planet s center. As the diagram below shows, the outermost region of the planet, the "atmosphere" that is visible from Earth, consists of clouds of ammonia, methane, and water. The pressure within the cloud layer is about one atmosphere, and the temperature, about 165 K (about -100 °C). 

The Galileo entry probe was sent to Jupiter to sound the atmosphere down through the main cloud layers, to profile the clouds and measure the abundances of the important cloud-forming condensates ammonia, water vapor and hydrogen sulfide in warm, upwelling, condensate-free air. Improbably, and unfortunately, it fell into and sampled a rare region of subsiding, cloud-free, and extremely dry stratospheric air. 

As for the matter whereof the Plants and Animals there consist , Huygens went on, we may venture to assert that their Growth and Nourishment proceeds from some liquid Principle. He suggested that the dark spots seen on the surface of Jupiter are likely to be clouds of condensed water vapour. Yet he added that I can t... 

Water is present in Jupiter s atmosphere both in the troposphere and in the stratosphere. Observations of tropospheric water were made with the Kuiper Airborne Telescope and the IRIS (Infrared Interferometer Spectrometer and Radiometer) Spectrometer on board Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 From these data the vertical distribution of water in the level from 16 bar in Jupiter s troposphere was derived. A thin H2O ice cloud would form at 2 bars, T = 200 K (Bjoraker, Larson and Kunde, 1986 [30]). 

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