There’s order in chaos
Our Juno spacecraft captured this view of Jupiter during the @NASASolarSystem mission’s 54th close flyby of the giant planet on Sept. 7, 2023. The image was made with raw data from the JunoCam instrument that was processed to enhance details in cloud features and colors.
The violent nature of Jupiter’s roiling atmosphere has always intrigued researchers. Using Juno's suite of science instruments allows scientists to observe below Jupiter’s turbulent cloud deck to uncover how the gas giant works from the inside out.
Gravity data collected by Juno shows Jupiter’s atmospheric winds penetrate the planet in a cylindrical manner, parallel to its spin axis. The measurements of the gravity field matched a two-decade-old model that determined Jupiter’s powerful east-west zonal flows extend inward from the cloud-level white and red zones and belts.
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.
Our next mission to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, will explore the ocean of liquid below the moon’s icy crust. Send your name (or your pet’s) along for journey at go.nasa.gov/MessageInABottle (also linked in bio). Submissions close on Dec. 31.
Image description: A two-image swipe through of one hemisphere of Jupiter seen against the darkness of space. The planets clouds form colorful stripes, bands, and swirls in shades of blue and brown in cool tones.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Tanya Oleksuik CC BY NC SA 3.0
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15 November 2023
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