NASA’s Juno Finds Jupiter’s Winds Penetrate in Cylindrical Layers

The violent nature of Jupiter’s roiling atmosphere has long been a source of fascination for astronomers and planetary scientists, and Juno has had a ringside seat to the goings-on since it entered orbit in 2016. During each of the spacecraft’s 55 to date, a suite of science instruments has peered below Jupiter’s turbulent cloud deck to uncover how the gas giant works from the inside out.

This illustration depicts findings that Jupiter’s atmospheric winds penetrate the planet in a cylindrical manner and parallel to its spin axis. The most dominant jet recorded by NASA’s Juno is shown in the cutout: The jet is at 21 degrees north latitude at cloud level, but 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers) below that, it’s at 13 degrees north latitude. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/SWRI/MSSS/ASI/ INAF/JIRAM/Björn Jónsson

One way the Juno mission learns about the planet’s interior is via radio science. Using NASA’s Deep Space Network antennas, scientists track the spacecraft’s radio signal as Juno flies past Jupiter at speeds near 130,000 mph (209,000 kph), measuring tiny changes in its velocity – as small as 0.01 millimeter per second.

Those changes are caused by variations in the planet’s gravity field, and by measuring them, the mission can essentially see into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Such measurements have led to numerous discoveries, including the existence of a dilute core deep within Jupiter and the depth of the planet’s zones and belts, which extend from the cloud tops down approximately 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers).

To determine the location and cylindrical nature of the winds, the study’s authors applied a mathematical technique that models gravitational variations and surface elevations of rocky planets like Earth.

At Jupiter, the technique can be used to accurately map winds at depth.

Using the high-precision Juno data, the authors were able to generate a four-fold increase in the resolution over previous models created with data from NASA’s trailblazing Jovian explorers Voyager and Galileo.

“We applied a constraining technique developed for sparse data sets on terrestrial planets to process the Juno data,” said Ryan Park, a Juno scientist and lead of the mission’s gravity science investigation from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“This is the first time such a technique has been applied to an outer planet.”

The measurements of the gravity field matched a two-decade-old model that determined Jupiter’s powerful east-west zonal flows extend from the cloud-level white and red zones and belts inward.

But the measurements also revealed that rather than extending in every direction like a radiating sphere, the zonal flows go inward, cylindrically, and are oriented along the direction of Jupiter’s rotation axis.

How Jupiter’s deep atmospheric winds are structured has been in debated since the 1970s, and the Juno mission has now settled the debate.

“All 40 gravity coefficients measured by Juno matched our previous calculations of what we expect the gravity field to be if the winds penetrate inward on cylinders,” said Yohai Kaspi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, the study’s lead author and a Juno co-investigator.

Along with bettering the current understanding of Jupiter’s internal structure and origin, the new gravity model application could be used to gain more insight into other planetary atmospheres. (NASA)

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

Salts and Organics Observed on Ganymede’s Surface by NASA’s Juno

Data collected by NASA’s Juno mission indicates a briny past may be bubbling to the surface on Jupiter’s largest moon.

Astronomers detect most distant fast radio burst to date

An international team has spotted a remote blast of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond. This 'fast radio burst' is the most distant ever detected. Its source was pinned down by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in a galaxy so far away that its light took eight billion years to reach us.

NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Preparing for its First Asteroid Flyby

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is preparing for its first close-up look at an asteroid. On Nov. 1, it will fly by asteroid Dinkinesh and test its instruments in preparation for visits in the next decade to multiple Trojan asteroids that circle the Sun in the same orbit as Jupiter.

NASA’s Bennu Asteroid Sample Contains Carbon, Water

Initial studies of the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu sample collected in space and brought to Earth by NASA show evidence of high-carbon content and water, which together could indicate the building blocks of life on Earth may be found in the rock.

NASA’s Perseverance Captures Dust-Filled Martian Whirlwind

The six-wheeled geologist spotted the twister as part of an atmospheric exploration of Jezero Crater.

NASA’s Webb Finds Carbon Source on Surface of Jupiter’s Moon Europa

Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of a handful of worlds in our solar system that could potentially harbor conditions suitable for life.