Juno’s flight reveals stunning images of Jupiter and sounds of the moon at Ganymede
4 min readThe largest planet in our solar system increasingly looks like a work of art. It’s full of surprises – just like its moons.
NASA’s Juno mission, which began Jupiter’s orbit In July 2016, it recently flew over 38 on the gas giant. The mission was extended earlier this year, adding in June a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.
The data and images from these flights rewrite everything we know about Jupiter, said Scott Bolton, principal investigator for Jupiter Juno’s mission, at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, during a meeting at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held Friday in New Orleans.
Bolton revealed 50 seconds of sound created when Juno flew over Ganymede during summer. The moon’s sound clip was generated by electrical and magnetic radio waves produced by the planet’s magnetic field and picked up by the spacecraft’s Waves instrument, designed to detect those waves. Sounds like a space age soundtrack.
‘Which – which Audio recording “It’s wild enough to make you feel like you’re riding alongside Juno as it (the probe) passes through Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades,” Bolton said. “If you listen carefully, you can hear the sudden shift to higher frequencies near the middle of the recording, which marks the entry into a different region of the Ganymede magnetosphere.”
Juno’s team continues to analyze Ganymede Bridge data. At the time, Juno was about 1,038 kilometers (645 miles) from The surface of the moon It spins at 67,000 kilometers per hour (41,600 miles per hour).
William Court, principal investigator for the Waves instrument, which is based at the University of Iowa, said in a statement in Iowa City.
The team also shared cool new photos that look like artistic visions From the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter.
“You can see how incredibly beautiful Jupiter is,” Bolton said. “It really is an artist’s painting. It’s almost like a painting Van Gogh. You see these wonderful swirls and swirling clouds of different colors.”
These stunning images help scientists better understand Jupiter and its many mysteries. Images of hurricanes at Jupiter’s poles intrigue Leah Siegelman, a scientist working with the Juno mission team who studies regularly Earth’s oceans. She saw parallels between the dynamics of Jupiter’s atmosphere and the eddies in Earth’s oceans.
“When I saw the richness of the turbulence surrounding Hurricanes Jovian, with all the threads and little eddies, it reminded me of the turbulence you see in the ocean around the eddies,” Sigelman, a physical oceanographer and postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Institute wrote. Bachelor’s degree in Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.
“This is especially evident in But not everyone gets their dreams fulfilled Resolving eddies in Earth’s oceans, which are revealed by plankton blooms that act as flow tracers.”
Mapping the magnetic field of Jupiter
Juno’s data also helps scientists determine Jupiter’s magnetic field, including the Great Blue Spot. This region is a magnetic anomaly located at Jupiter’s equator – not to be confused with the Great Red Spot, an atmospheric storm that has persisted for centuries south of the equator.
Since Juno’s arrival at Jupiter, the team has experienced a shift in the planet’s magnetic field. The Great Blue Spot is moving east at about 5.1 centimeters per second and will complete a circle around the planet in 350 years.
Meanwhile, the Great Red Spot is moving west and will make a full turn much faster, in about 4.5 years.
But the Great Blue Spot is destroyed by Jupiter’s planes, giving it a striped appearance. This visible pattern tells scientists that these winds extend much deeper into the gaseous planet’s interior.
a map magnetic field From Jupiter, generated by Juno data, it also revealed that the action of the planet’s dynamo, which creates the magnetic field from within Jupiter, originates from metallic hydrogen under a layer of “helium rain”.
Juno was also able to check the very faint ring of dust around Jupiter from inside the ring. This dust is actually made up of two of the planet’s small moons, called Metis and Adrastea. The observations allowed the researchers to see part of the constellation Perseus from a different planetary perspective.
“It’s amazing to see these familiar constellations from a spacecraft half a billion miles away,” wrote Heidi Becker, co-principal investigator for instruments in the Juno Star Reference Module at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“But everything looks pretty much the same as it was when we enjoyed it from Our backyard is here on Earth. It’s an inspiring reminder of how small we are and how much there is to explore.”
number Autumn 2022, Jupiter will fly through the planet’s moon Europa, which will be visited by its Europa Clipper mission, scheduled for launch in 2024. Europa is of interest to scientists because a global ocean lies under its ice shell. Occasionally, feathers spurt into space from holes in the ice. The Europa Clipper will be able to investigate “tasting” the ocean and fly through the plumes – and discover if life is possible in this oceanic world.
Participate:
“Entrepreneur. Music enthusiast. Lifelong communicator. General coffee aficionado. Internet scholar.”