Juno Science Results Options

[hendric]

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/junoteleconference

Many surprises!

Jupiter not uniform below clouds!

Giant ammonia plume comes up from equator!

Core diffuse, possibly dissolving!

Magnetic field up close has surprised!


Congrats on the amateur images everyone!

[Gerald]

Here a link to the abstracts of the GRL special issue "Early Results: Juno at Jupiter".

[hendric]

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6340

Science magazine also has a couple of articles on Juno results.

[ChrisC]

Full news conference with slides:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o9FiTf1vZE

Time markers:
01:15 Diane Brown intro
02:43 Scott Bolton, orbit overview, three methods to peer into interior
09:20 microwave results (down to 350 km below clouds)
16:00 gravity field discussion
17:00 Jack Connerney with magnetic field results
20:00 aurorae
22:30 particle impact detections
24:10 Heidi Becker with view looking OUT past rings at Orion, no radiation hits to image sensor
27:45 Candy Hansen with JunoCam
34:45 back to Scott Bolton for audible radio results and next orbit plans

[nprev]

ADMIN NOTE: Edited topic title to make this an omnibus thread for Juno findings (pressers, papers, etc.)

[JRehling]

I was curious about the estimated mass of heavy elements in Jupiter, which is possibly the single most fundamental statistic that Juno can derive. At this admittedly very early point in Juno's mission, the paper by Wahl, et al estimated 7-25 Earth masses. Keep in mind that Militzer, et al (2008) estimated the same at 14-18 Earth masses, which is better constrained. Hopefully, the remaining (>90%) of Juno's orbits will nail this down much better. (I wonder if the earlier result actually had a greater uncertainty… some research admits to some fundamental unknowns and derive results that are presuming some quantities that aren't actually known.)

What Jupiter's structure is like tells us about the evolution and dynamics of large planets, but the bulk composition tells us the really fundamental thing – what kinds of protoplanetary clouds make what kinds of planetary systems in general.

[alan]

Michael Wong‏ @Miquai

Until today, I have never had a class that audibly FREAKED OUT at something a professor showed. What a time to be alive.
3:07 PM - 29 Sep 2017 from Pasadena, CA

https://twitter.com/Miquai/status/913887910637715458

In reference to a Juno result that was under embargo, perhaps it will revealed at the DPS meeting this week.

[elakdawalla]

Sadly, no Juno press briefing this week. I'm told AGU should be good.

[Tom Tamlyn]

Is there any likelihood that a video of Scott Bolton's AAS231 plenary session lecture on results from the Juno mission will be publicly released?

I read something on the AAS website to the effect that videotapes of ordinary meeting sessions are posted on the AAS members' site as a "member benefit," but I was hoping that the video of this lecture wouldn't be restricted to members.

[JRehling]

Some people have posted on Twitter photos of and comments about Bolton's Jan. 9 lecture. Some of the Twitter quotes are ambiguous or cryptic, but there are some definite and stunning new discoveries.

• Cyclones circling Jupiter's north pole form an octagon, whereas the south pole shows a pentagon.
• Jupiter's magnetic field twice as strong as expected.
• More lightning than expected.
• Odd-numbered harmonics in gravitational field expected to be zero, but aren't.
• Impossible for one or two entry probes to provide the big picture. (Implications for future Saturn, etc. missions.)
• Aurorae somehow switch off at night.
• Great Red Spot has roots that reach much more deeply (>350 km) into atmosphere than zones and belts do.
• All heavy elements enriched (over solar) by same amount, except water is depleted. (Galileo Probe result?)

Overall: "Everything" we thought we knew about Jupiter's interior before Juno was wrong.

I note from IR images that most polar cyclones have swirling hot/cold centers, but three at south pole cold only.

As mentioned in previous releases:
• Larger, fuzzy core instead of small, compact one or none.
• River of gases rich in ammonia flowing from depths up to surface near equator.

Profoundly spectacular video showing a dive through the Great Red Spot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lsKC1NVaqw

A long approach video shows Galileans orbiting "half" Jupiter for (several?) weeks.

My sense is that this talk seems to have contained more significant discoveries concerning one world than we've seen in a long time except maybe Pluto; that's rather stunning when one considers that this is the sixth mission dedicated to Jupiter, and moreover, that the mission isn't half over.

[jman0war]

Wow some very nice image processing on this forum.
I hope someone assembles a best-of and puts them into a single thread someday.

How close to those cloud tops do you think humanity will ever mange to reach ?

Via unmanned satellite of course.

[Explorer1]

Well we had the Galileo probe, which went right through the cloud tops (and below!) in 1995. Do you mean the lowest possible orbit?

[jman0war]

Well we had the Galileo probe, which went right through the cloud tops (and below!) in 1995. Do you mean the lowest possible orbit?

Ah, i guess i don't remember seeing any stunning images like these.
I do remember the moons though.

[JRehling]

The Galileo Probe had no camera. There's no guarantee that a view from inside the clouds would be interesting, or – even if beautiful – scientifically rewarding, and it would have been a very expensive instrument needing a lot of bandwidth during a very short time window.

The Galileo Orbiter returned some very nice images of Jupiter's clouds, but Juno is producing a more stunning gallery, thanks to people on this board and others. There were no programmatic scientific investigations for JunoCam, but it seems increasingly likely that there'll be scientific value had from them sooner or later.

[mcaplinger]

The Galileo Probe had no camera... it would have been a very expensive instrument needing a lot of bandwidth during a very short time window.

There was actually a proposal for a low-cost camera that fit within the data allocation for the Galileo probe, but it wasn't selected.

[Paolo]

There was actually a proposal for a low-cost camera that fit within the data allocation for the Galileo probe, but it wasn't selected.

given how limited the data return from the Galileo orbiter eventually was, we can be thankful for that!

[Explorer1]

It seems that for the foreseeable future, the only views from any of the gas giant atmospheres will remain those gorgeous artist's concepts (Don Dixon, Adolf Schaller, etc.)

[Gerald]

Today, four Nature papers about new findings by the Juno mission have been released online, but only the abstracts are free:
Clusters of cyclones encircling Jupiter’s poles
A suppression of differential rotation in Jupiter’s deep interior
Jupiter’s atmospheric jet streams extend thousands of kilometres deep
Measurement of Jupiter’s asymmetric gravity field

This allows to discuss the circumpolar cyclones on the missionjuno Think Tank site.

[Gerald]

Additionally, John Rogers has released a version of the CPC observations on the BAA website, together with several animations we compiled over a little more than a year.

[cIclops]

VIDEO: 2018 Fall Meeting Press Conference: A mid-mission report on the discoveries of NASA’s Juno

[Bjorn Jonsson]

A very interesting video. I was particularly impressed by the SRU images; Jupiter's nightside in Ioshine!

[scalbers]

I wonder when models will be able to simulate the patterns and the colors of the clouds. In the (pre-Juno) paper below, figure 5 shows the patterns, though doesn't include the microphysics/chemistry to show things like cloud opacity and colors.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/25...ian_atmospheres (see figure 5a).

[JRehling]

I've done some recent reading on Juno findings and moreover, tried to illustrate for myself how Juno science has fit into earlier understanding.

One simple kind of framing that is eternally hard to grasp with Jupiter is just how big the planet is and how limited in scope our studies from the top looking down are. Simply put, the Galileo Probe's descent (while instruments were operating) penetrated only 1/450th of the way to Jupiter's center. Juno has revealed that the part of the upper atmosphere that has winds is 3000 km deep – about 20 times the depth of the Galileo Probe's descent, and about 1/25th of the whole planet.

There has been some beautiful work regarding Juno's observed anisotropy of ammonia in the upper atmosphere.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/shallow-li...juno-scientists

In retrospect, it seems obvious: When a minority atmospheric component undergoes phase transitions, that allows for mechanisms that can segregate the compound considerably from one place to another (e.g., with water on Earth).

It's also been wonderful that Juno and the end of the Cassini mission provided an almost simultaneous comparison of Jupiter and Saturn and the simple synthesis is that of the three layers in each planet – let's call the upper atmosphere with winds (A), a dense "mantle" of liquid metallic hydrogen (, and whatever core exists, apparently fuzzy in its boundaries ( C ) – Jupiter has a relatively small extent of A and C and is mainly B; Saturn, in contrast, has a much more even division of A, B, and C.

We're still waiting to get an answer on the single question that most motivated Juno – how much core is there? However, the discovery of a fuzzy mantle seems to speak to the formation of Jupiter. This seemingly precludes any origin in which a gigantic rocky-metal core formed first and then the hydrogen-helium atmosphere was pulled from the protoplanetary nebula onto it.

When they announced that an orbiter would be the choice of followup mission for addressing what the Galileo Probe failed to measure, I was skeptical but in retrospect, this was overwhelmingly the right choice. An entry probe could not possibly examine horizontal variations in Jupiter's structure and even with remarkable improvements in depth of penetration could not have probed as deeply as Juno has.

I'm sure there's a lot more Juno science to come. This has really been a wonderful mission even aside from the breathtaking imagery which was never the inspiration for the mission in the first place. Studying the interior of Jupiter is a huge challenge and kudos to the people who conceived of this mission and made it real.

Edit: Here's a nice recent synthesis of work on the deep interior.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.05697.pdf

[Brian Swift]

From @NASASolarSystem tweet:

Join experts from our #JunoMission as they reveal new findings that provide a more comprehensive understanding of Jupiter's roiling atmosphere.
Thursday, Oct. 28
3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT)
Watch here or at http://nasa.gov/live

[vikingmars]

New results from Juno were published in the last 19 November issue of Science :
- "The depth of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot constrained by Juno gravity overflights";
- "Microwave observations reveal the deep extent and structure of Jupiter’s atmospheric vortices".
(weblink : https://www.science.org/toc/science/374/6570 )

And look at the truly spectacular image published on the cover : any idea when it was taken ?
Have you seen it before ?

[Tom Tamlyn]

The image processing is credited to Kevin Gill. He's a member here, and you could send him a PM, although he's not very active.

Or you could post the question on his twitter feed. https://twitter.com/kevinmgill

[vikingmars]

The image processing is credited to Kevin Gill. He's a member here, and you could send him a PM, although he's not very active.
Or you could post the question on his twitter feed. https://twitter.com/kevinmgill

Thanks a lot Tom

[mcaplinger]

The image processing is credited to Kevin Gill. He's a member here, and you could send him a PM, although he's not very active.

He's probably too busy processing Junocam images, when he's not working his day job at JPL on MSL ops. I always get a kick out of seeing his name on MSL project emails when he is on-shift.

[djellison]

Yeah - he's an awesome part of the OPGS and ECAM teams. I was so pleased when his name came up as someone who could join our little ECAM team - I jumped at the chance

[cIclops]

#AGU21 Science Press briefing 17 December 2021

Latest results about the gas giant’s Great Blue Spot, polar cyclones, magnetosphere, rings, interior and Imagery contributions of the mission’s citizen scientists.

[Phil Stooke]

This session at LPSC:

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2022/...ram.htm#sess305

has some good things from Juno at Jupiter (and a few Pluto goodies).

JIRAM infrared results for Io volcanoes
Ganymede aurora observations
Geology from Juno images
topographic mapping from Juno stereo - including a large dome.

There was some discussion earlier about whether Juno images of Ganymede would be scientifically useful, and they certainly were.

Phil

[Marcin600]

AGU22 Press Conference: The Latest Science Results from NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter, December 14, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbGgwr-Qq-Y

[vjkane]

AGU22 Press Conference: The Latest Science Results from NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter, December 14, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbGgwr-Qq-Y

I sat in on the press conference (but was at the conference for the science portion). Was surprised at how few press members were there. I think that about all of them are in the video (I'm in a back corner and not visible).

[Brian Swift]

AGU22 Press Conference: The Latest Science Results from NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter, December 14, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbGgwr-Qq-Y

Thanks. I didn't know the project is no longer planning an active disposal of Juno into Jupiter, and that funding will continue until Juno fails due to accumulated radiation degradation or it runs out of fuel which is needed to point the high gain antenna at Earth to return data. This discussion was at the end of the press conference starting here https://youtu.be/bbGgwr-Qq-Y?t=2382

[stevesliva]

Ganymede science results in Nature

[Tom Tamlyn]

Thanks. I didn't know the project is no longer planning an active disposal of Juno into Jupiter, and that funding will continue until Juno fails due to accumulated radiation degradation or it runs out of fuel which is needed to point the high gain antenna at Earth to return data. This discussion was at the end of the press conference starting here https://youtu.be/bbGgwr-Qq-Y?t=2382

Thanks Brian, that snippet was interesting. Apparently (and subject to review now in progress), the mission planners are satisfied that, because of the way Juno's orbit has precessed during the extended mission, it is no longer possible for Juno to plunge into Europa.

I had understood that chaotic orbital mechanics means that you can "never say never," but I guess the point is that Juno will impact Jupiter at some point, and while it's probably not possible to say when, it is possible to say that it will happen before chaos has a chance to do something really bizarre that would put Europa at risk of an impact with Juno.

Also interesting to hear that NASA apparently gave Juno an open-ended financial commitment, which I gather is not usually the done thing.

[vjkane]

Thanks Brian, that snippet was interesting. Apparently (and subject to review now in progress), the mission planners are satisfied that, because of the way Juno's orbit has precessed during the extended mission, it is no longer possible for Juno to plunge into Europa.

At a recent meeting (I forget which one), Bolton said that they could tweak the orbits for additional Io observations. Presumably this uses fuel faster.

However, once the Io encounters are over, I wonder if the team will adopt a strategy of fuel conservation to extend observations as long as possible. I'm sure this is utterly unrealistic, but it would be awesome if Juno was still operating when Clipper and JUICE arrive to provide fields and particles observations from a third location within the magnetosphere.

The next OPAG meeting is in a couple of weeks I believe, and there will be an update on the Juno meeting. I expect a focus on the upcoming Io encounters but perhaps there will be a slide on longer term plans.

[volcanopele]

New paper about Juno JIRAM science results from my NF Data Analysis program group!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-02123-5

[nprev]

Congratulations on the paper; nicely done!

Interesting. I would have expected Io to be much more homogeneous not far below the surface. Always thought of it as basically a molten ball with a thin crust and a solid core.