When I first saw the images above on NASA's Earth Observatory site, I really couldn't believe it. The swirls and whorls look remarkably similar, yet one was taken by a satellite over Earth's Baltic Sea, and the other by the Juno spacecraft orbiting around Jupiter, hundreds of millions of miles away.
The differences between the two planets couldn't be more stark. Earth is a terrestrial planet made mostly of metal and rock. The other terrestrial planets within the inner solar system are Venus, Mars, and Mercury. (You can think of the Moon as kind of an honorary terrestrial planet.)
Jupiter, on the other hand, is a giant gas planet, composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. The word "giant" really applies, as it is twice as massive as all the other planets combined. In fact, Jupiter contains 70 percent of our solar system's planetary material.
Like Earth, it does have something ...
