JUPITERS ATMOSPHERIC BEAUTY IS MORE THAN SKIN DEEP Mar 18, 2018
Mar 18, 2018
In the year and a half NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter, the science team led by Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Scott Bolton has discovered that the orange and white bands that characterize Jupiter’s outer atmosphere extend thousands of miles into the gas giant’s atmosphere. The findings are part of a four-article collection about Juno science results in the March 8th edition of the journal Nature.
“With Juno only about a third of the way through its primary mission, we are being presented with a whole new Jupiter that is shaking up our basic understanding of giant planets throughout the universe,” said Bolton, principal investigator of the mission and a coauthor of the Nature papers. “Surprisingly, the Jupiter we grew up knowing and loving, dressed in gorgeous colorful bands across its midsection, is now known to be beautiful down deep as well.”
The four Nature articles focus on the structure of Jupiter’s deep interior and the surprising discovery of clusters of cyclones encircling Jupiter’s poles. One paper discusses Juno’s unique orbit, and how the spacecraft’s precise radio tracking system measures Jupiter’s gravity field.
“This Juno system is so technically advanced that measurement capabilities have been improved by orders of magnitude in precision,” Bolton said. This improved accuracy allowed scientists to detect an asymmetry in Jupiter’s structure at depths near 3,000 km. “This asymmetry mirrors what we see in Jupiter’s cloud layer, those colorful bands that blow across Jupiter.” A second paper describes how these belts and zones manifest themselves as jet streams deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
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