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Shuttle space trips may be over, but spacecraft launches are still going on, and on August 5th, NASA launched the spacecraft Juno, which will explore Jupiter’s secrets. Astronomers think that the presence of Jupiter may help explain how the Earth came to exist.

Jupiter is huge–the rest of our solar system would fit inside it, with room to spare. Scientists think that large planets like this, in an outer orbit, absorb some of the blows from asteroids that might otherwise destroy smaller, inner planets (like Earth), so they are on the lookout for solar systems that contain Jupiter-like planets.
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Why these giant planets matter – Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere, with one in the north and one in the south. Now one of its red stripes seems to missing and astronomers don’t know what’s going on.
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We’re about to discover life on Mars?now astronomers think there may be life on a moon of Jupiter!

With average temperatures of minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, an almost nonexistent atmosphere and a complex web of cracks in a layer of ice encompassing the entire surface, the environment on Jupiter?s moon Europa is about as alien as they come. So are the enormous forces behind the surface display, namely an ocean beneath the ice nine times deeper than Earth?s deepest ocean trench and gravitational affects from a planet 318 times the mass of Earth.
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