Close Encounter with Jupiter: Tonight, September 26th the planet Jupiter will be closer to the Earth

[elleng]

than it has been since 1963, 59 years ago! The largest planet in our Solar System will be just 370 million miles away, which sounds like a lot, but for Jupiter is practically touching. Just how big is Jupiter? If we mashed all the other planets together (include Pluto if you want to), then waved a magic wand over it and doubled the mass, you still would not have Jupiter. Even with a pair of binoculars, tonight you could see at least some of the four largest moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. These moons were discovered in 1610 by Galileo and are called the Galilean Satellites. Ganymede is the biggest moon in the Solar System and is larger in diameter than the planet Mercury (but smaller mass). Also, NASA is slamming into an asteroid this evening at 7:14 pm EDT. The DART mission is to study how a satellite impact alters the orbit of an asteroid and possibly be used in the future to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

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