NASA's Juno spacecraft flew over Jupiter's Great Red Spot twice

In February and July 2019, NASA's Juno spacecraft flew directly over the Great Red Spot, which is about 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) wide

Scientists revealed the latest discoveries on Jupiter, including surprising findings about the planet's Great Red Spot and the cyclonic storms swirling at the poles, in a NASA press conference on Thursday.

The Great Red Spot was thought to be a storm shaped as a flat "pancake," according to Scott Bolton, principal investigator of NASA's Juno mission and director of the space science and engineering division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

"We knew it lasted a long time, but we didn't know how deep or how it really worked," Bolton said in the press conference.

In February and July 2019, NASA's Juno spacecraft flew directly over the Great Red Spot, which is about 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) wide, to figure out how deep the vortex extends beneath the visible cloud tops. Two papers published Thursday in the journal Science have detailed what Juno discovered.

Scientists had believed the depth of the storm and the planet's weather layer would be constrained to depths where sunlight can penetrate or water and ammonia are expected to condense -- the planet's cloud level. However, the storm wasn't a shallow meteorological feature, the researchers found.

A microwave radiometer on Juno gave scientists a three-dimensional look at the planet. They discovered that the Great Red Spot is between 124 miles (200 kilometers) and 311 miles (500 kilometers) deep, extending much deeper into the gas giant than expected.