Just because Pluto or comets aren't as big as Jupiter doesn't mean they are not scientifically important - indeed, just the reverse is often true. Sometimes, great things come in small packages.
When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature.
The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn't expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.
Mars is much closer to the characteristics of Earth. It has a fall, winter, summer and spring. North Pole, South Pole, mountains and lots of ice. No one is going to live on Venus; no one is going to live on Jupiter.
The first real Cassini image that brought tears to my eyes was an image of Jupiter. I didn't expect it to look so detailed.
Every type of ring behavior we have seen around Jupiter, Uranus, or Neptune can be found in orbit around Saturn. And Saturn's ring system offers the greatest promise of understanding processes in operation within all disk systems, not just those found around planets.
If you were to stand on an asteroid in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter in our solar system, you might be able to see one or two asteroids in the sky, but they would be very far away and very, very small. So you wouldn't have this 'dodging through tons of rocks' business you get in the movies.
We must believe then, that as from hence we see Saturn and Jupiter; if we were in either of the Two, we should discover a great many Worlds which we perceive not; and that the Universe extends so in infinitum.
Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists.
Jupiter is so big and its gravitational pull so strong that man would find it difficult to move about on the surface. The answer is to whittle it down to proper size with terrajets and nuclear power, using the debris to increase the size of Jupiter's moons so they, too, can be colonized.
