NASA’s Juno probe has peered beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops to create a very detailed 3D understanding of the gas giant’s atmosphere to date. The research has been published in a series of papers in the journal Science and the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
Juno has been orbiting the Gas Giant since 2016 and has been producing beautiful images of the planet using its JunoCam. But much of this recent research was done using Juno’s microwave radiometer (MWR) which is capable of looking through the clouds surrounding Jupiter and peeking deeper into its atmosphere.
Jupiter carrying several storms within
“Previously, Juno surprised us with hints that phenomena in Jupiter’s atmosphere went deeper than expected,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno and lead author of one of the new papers. “Now, we’re starting to put all these individual pieces together and getting our first real understanding of how Jupiter’s beautiful and violent atmosphere works — in 3D.”
Jupiter’s atmosphere carries many huge storms within, which are warm and thinner on top, and cooler and denser at the bottom. These massive cyclones are as deep as 60 miles into the atmosphere. And Jupiter’s Great Red Spot stretches over 200 miles wide. It’s so huge that astronomers were able to determine the changes in its velocity with the help of instruments that study Jupiter’s gravity.
Changes in the Great Red Spot
“The precision required to get the Great Red Spot’s gravity during the July 2019 flyby is staggering,” said Marzia Parisi, a Juno scientist from NASA’s JPL and lead author of a paper on gravity overflights of the Great Red Spot. “Being able to complement MWR’s finding on the depth gives us great confidence that future gravity experiments at Jupiter will yield equally intriguing results.”
The Hubble Space Telescope has been observing the Great Red Spot for over a decade. The storm has been observed on the surface of the planet for more than 150 years – and it’s still as mysterious as ever. Hubble found out that the average wind speeds of the Red Spot are increasing at a steady pace. Between 2009 and 2020, wind speeds along the boundaries of the storm increased by 8%.
