#Bizwhiznetwork.com Innovation ΛＩ |Technology News
Data collected by Juno during its first pass over Jupiter’s mysterious, roiling storm called the Great Red Spot in July 2017 indicate that this famous feature has roots that penetrate about 200 miles (300 km) into the gas giant’s atmosphere.
This full-disc image of Jupiter was taken on 21 April 2014 with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Image credit: NASA / ESA / A. Simon, Goddard Space Flight Center.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — a spinning, cyclone-like storm just south of the planet’s equator — has been monitored since 1830 and has possibly existed for more than 350 years.
Measuring 10,000 miles (16,000 km) in width as of April 3, 2017, the storm is 1.3 times as wide as Earth. In modern times, it has appeared to be shrinking.
Its reddish color is likely a product of chemicals being broken apart by solar UV light in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere.
This figure shows data from the six channels of Juno’s microwave radiometer (MWR) instrument. The data were collected in the mission’s sixth science orbit, during which the spacecraft passed over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The top layer in the figure is a visible light image from the mission’s JunoCam instrument, provided for context. The MWR instrument enables Juno to see deeper into Jupiter than any previous spacecraft or Earth-based observations. Each MWR channel peers progressively deeper below the visible cloud tops. Channel 1 is sensitive to longer microwave wavelengths; each of the other channels is sensitive to progressively shorter wavelengths. The large-scale structure of the Great Red Spot is visible in the data as deep into Jupiter as MWR can observe. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI.
“One of the most basic questions about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is: how deep are the roots?” said Juno’s principal investigator Dr. Scott Bolton, from the Southwest Research Institute.
“Juno data indicate that the Solar System’s most famous storm has roots that penetrate about 200 miles into the planet’s atmosphere.”
The science instrument responsible for this in-depth revelation was Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR).
“Juno found that the Great Red Spot’s roots go 50 to 100 times deeper than Earth’s oceans and are warmer at the base than they are at the top,” added Juno co-investigator Professor Andy Ingersoll, from Caltech.
“Winds are associated with differences in temperature, and the warmth of the spot’s base explains the ferocious winds we see at the top of the atmosphere.”
Juno also has detected a new radiation zone, just above Jupiter’s atmosphere, near the equator.
The zone includes energetic hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur ions moving at almost light speed.
“The closer you get to Jupiter, the weirder it gets,” said Dr. Heidi Becker, Juno’s radiation monitoring investigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“We knew the radiation would probably surprise us, but we didn’t think we’d find a new radiation zone that close to the planet. We only found it because Juno’s unique orbit around Jupiter allows it to get really close to the cloud tops during science collection flybys, and we literally flew through it.”
The spacecraft also found signatures of a high-energy heavy ion population within the inner edges of Jupiter’s relativistic electron radiation belt — a region dominated by electrons moving close to the speed of light.
The signatures are observed during Juno’s high-latitude encounters with the electron belt, in regions never explored by prior spacecraft. The origin and exact species of these particles is not yet understood.
These findings were announced today at the 2017 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, Louisiana.
_____
Michael A. Janssen et al. Results on Jupiter’s Atmosphere from the Juno Microwave Radiometer. 2017 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, paper # U21A-05
