Jupiter’s Moons

“Jupiter’s Moons” with Jane Houston Jones at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. — Please subscribe to: • www.YouTube.com • www.YouTube.com — Jupiter has 63 confirmed moons, giving it the largest retinue of moons with “reasonably secure” orbits of any planet in the Solar System. The most massive of them, the four Galilean moons, were discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei and were the first objects found to orbit a body that was neither Earth nor the Sun. From the end of the 19th century, dozens of much smaller Jovian moons have been discovered and have received the names of lovers, conquests, or daughters of the Roman god Jupiter, or his Greek equivalent, Zeus. The Galileans are far and away the largest objects in orbit around Jupiter, with the remaining 59 moons and the rings together comprising just 0.003 percent of the total orbiting mass. • en.wikipedia.org — Jupiters largest moons were first seen 400 years ago in early 1610. On the seventh of January, 1610 in Padua, Italy, Galileo looked up above the constellation Orion. He aimed his telescope at the well-known starry wanderer, the planet Jupiter, which was near Orion that night. What he saw through his telescope startled him and marked the beginning of modern astronomy.Jupiter was not just one object, as he wrote and drew in his journal. There are three stars in the heavens moving about Jupiter, as Venus and Mercury around the sun, he wrote. Galileos January 7 observation showed …