AS101 Study Guide - Final Guide: Orbital Speed, Surface Gravity, Planetary Science
Document Summary
The important features of the jovian planets are their rings (they all have rings), their many moons (jupiter is now known to have over. 60), and their composition (all are called gas giants because they consists mainly of h and he in both gas and liquid state with some type of small rocky metal core). Relative to earth they dominate the solar system and are much further from the sun than any of the terrestrial planets. This composite picture (above) comes from photos taken by spacecraft voyager 2 on its fly-by journey of the jovian planets in the. 1980s; the galileo mission to jupiter in the mid-1990s gave us enormous information about jupiter; the cassini mission to saturn, now in progress, has provided some stunning pictures and data. From a human"s perspective on jupiter, the sun would appear as a tiny disk in the sky shinning 1/27th as bright as on earth and on.
