Jupiter weather satellite Options

[Tom Womack]

I've been wondering how you'd design a Meteosat system for Jupiter.

There is of course the initial question of why you'd want to ... the images would be intrinsically beautiful, it's an interesting domain of turbulent fluids, forecasting the weather on a second planet might help with forecasting on ours, but really it just looks pretty.

Jupiter-synchronous orbit is stupidly low and very radiation-filled, so you'd probably want to observe from the distance of Callisto, and you'd need three satellites at 120-degree intervals around that orbit. A camera like the one on Deep Impact would give a resolution of four kilometres (2 microradians at two million kilometres) on Jupiter, which is I think rather better than anyone's achieved before even at fly-bys. It would let you get very good observation of Ionian activity, with about an 800-pixel disc, though I suspect it wouldn't tell you anything very exciting about the less active Jovian moons.

I suppose far-Jupiter-orbit insertion is intrinsically too expensive for this to be a remotely feasible mission; I've not found very good details of what the outer radiation belts of Jupiter look like, it may be that Callisto orbit is still absurdly unfriendly compared to LEO.