Tag: Jupiter

Cool image time! Using images from Juno, a citizen scientist going under the nom de plume YobiRoby has created the height map image to the right, showing three-dimensionality of the cloud surface of Jupiter.

Though they provide no details to go with this image, it appears it is centered on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the larger of the two big storms that are visible. While the smaller storm appears raised like a mound above the surrounding cloudtops, the Great Red Spot instead appears to be a mound that is depressed below the cloudtops.

The image on the right, cropped to post here, was taken by Juno on February 12, 2019 as the spacecraft made its 17th close approach of Jupiter. The Juno science team today has highlighted this version, processed by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran to enhance the details therein. They note how the white clouds can clear be seen sitting above the colored clouds below.

I cropped it to show the center of the storm. The full image is equally spectacular, as it shows the full storm. Unfortunately, there is no scale, but I suspect you could probably fit the entire Earth several times across the diameter of the storm.

Using several instruments, the Juno science team has successfully photographed an active volcano plume in Io’s polar regions. Two instruments measured the plume’s heat and radiation. Juno’s cameras meanwhile took the color image on the right. The bright spot on Io’s night side matches the location of the heat and radiation signatures from the other instruments.

JunoCam acquired the first images on Dec. 21 at 12:00, 12:15 and 12:20 coordinated universal time (UTC) before Io entered Jupiter’s shadow. The Images show the moon half-illuminated with a bright spot seen just beyond the terminator, the day-night boundary. “The ground is already in shadow, but the height of the plume allows it to reflect sunlight, much like the way mountaintops or clouds on the Earth continue to be lit after the sun has set,” explained Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, the JunoCam lead from the Planetary Science Institute.

This image is not the first time a spacecraft has caught an active volcanic plume on Io. In fact, practically the very first good images of Io during the Voyager 1 fly-by did this, confirming then that volcanoes are active on the Jupiter moon.

What this image further confirms however is how active Io really is. Volcanoes erupt there so continuously that it apparently isn’t that hard to catch one as it happens.

Cool movie time! Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt has created a time lapse movie using the images taken by Juno during its sixteenth close fly-by of Jupiter on October 29, 2018.

The movie is embedded below the fold. Quite spectacular. The colors are enhanced to bring out the details, and begins looking down at Jupiter’s north hemisphere at night.
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Cool image time! The photograph on the right, reduced to post here, was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran from the raw images taken by Juno during the spacecraft’s 16th close fly-by of Jupiter on October 29, 2018. If you click on it you can see the full resolution image.

At the time, Juno was about 4,400 miles (7,000 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees north.

What attracts me to this image is its dimensionality. First, it looks at Jupiter from an oblique angle. Second, the shadows of the upper clouds can clearly be seen being cast on the lower clouds. Third, if you look at the full resolution image you can even see this effect in the middle of the big white storm in the image’s top left.

What frustrates me about this image is that Juno is not in an orbit around Jupiter allowing it to make extended movies of the evolution of these cloud features. Gaining even a limited understanding the meteorology of this gas giant will simply not be possible until we can do this, and that will require many satellites orbiting the planet.

Cool image time! The image on the right, cropped to post here, shows the white center of one of the smaller giant storms on Jupiter, taken by Juno. The image was processed by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran. If you click on the image you can see the entire picture, which has a host of spectacular details surrounding the white spot.

Unfortunately, they do not provide a scale. Based on past experience, I would guess that this tiny storm probably exceeds the size of the Earth. What makes the image so impressive however are the white cloudtops visible as they swirl around the storm’s center. Sunlight shadows clearly shows that these thunderheads rise above rest of the storm.

The full image shows even more fascinating details. It is worthwhile studying, though one can certainly get lost in that vast and turbulent Jupiter atmosphere.

Cool image time. Mathematician and software programmer Gerald Eichstädt has released another movie using images from Juno’s thirteenth close fly-by of Jupiter.

I have embedded the movie below the fold. As he notes,

The movie covers two hours of this flyby in 125-fold time lapse, the time from 2018-05-24T04:41:00.000 to 2018-05-24T06:41:00.000. It is based on 27 of the JunoCam images taken during the flyby, and on spacecraft trajectory data provided via SPICE kernel files.

The view begins by looking down at the northern hemisphere, and gets to within 2,200 miles of the giant planet’s cloud tops.

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Several Juno images that have been cleverly processed by citizen scientists are being highlighted at a Jupiter conference being held in London this week.

JunoCam images presented at the meeting by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran include an animation showing the evolution of swirling features in the giant planet’s atmosphere and a composite image of Jupiter’s cloud tops.

Gerald Eichstädt, a mathematician working as a software professional, has taken two images from JunoCam and reprojected them to the same vantage point to enable a direct comparison between the images and show the subtle motions within the atmosphere. By modelling the movement of individual pixels in the images, he has created an animation that extrapolates the swirling evolution of the vortices in the atmosphere.

Eichstädt explains: “This animation represents a ‘feasibility test’. Building on this initial work, we can add in more variables that will give us a more detailed description and physical understanding of Jupiter’s atmosphere.”

Seán Doran, in collaboration with Eichstädt, has created a new composite image of Jupiter as seen by Juno as it swung away from Jupiter’s south pole on 1st April 2018. Because Jupiter was larger than JunoCam’s field of view when the main portion of the image was taken, Eichstädt rendered four other images to the same viewing geometry to reconstruct a mosaic of the whole planet. Doran then processed the composite image to balance and blend the overlapping components, sharpen the contrast, and fill gaps.

I have myself highlighted images by both previously at Behind the Black, here and here and here and here. This press release nicely places both in the limelight at last.

The Juno science team has released an animation that shows, in infrared and in three dimensions, the storms of Jupiter’s north pole.

The link has three videos. One shows the gas giant’s surprisingly irregular magnetic field, as found by Juno. The first and third show a low and a high fly-over of the north pole, in infrared. I have embedded both fly-overs below the fold. First watch the high fly-over, which is the first video. This will make the low fly-over more understandable as it flies over the eight smaller storms that encircle the pole’s central vortex.
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Cool image time! Yesterday I posted a short gif created by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt, using twelve Juno images, that showed some cloud changes over time. Today, I discovered that Eichstädt has created an even more spectacular movie, which I have embedded below the fold, based on images taken during Juno’s tenth close fly-by.

This movie shows the short-term dynamics Jupiter’s southern storms derived from raw JunoCam images of Juno’s Perijove-10 flyby on Dec 16, 2017.

You might also notice the effect of changing solar illumination on the appearance of the haze bands. JunoCam usually takes a time-lapse sequence of images during each perijove showing Jupiter’s polar regions. These images are taken from different perspectives along Juno’s trajectory. But it’s possible to reproject the JunoCam images to a common perspective. Displaying such a sequence rapidly reveals cloud motion in Jupiter’s storm systems.

This movie applies this technique. At the same time, it is changing the simulated perspective along Juno’s trajectory. The same short sequence of images is displayed in a loop, but due to the changing way of reprojecting the raw images, the shown surface area is changing more or less continuously.

Eichstädt warns that the blinking nature of the film might make it unsuitable for those with epilepsy. If this is not an issue for you, you should then definitely take a look.
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Cool image time! Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt, using twelve Juno images, has compiled a short gif movie that shows a tiny amount of cloud movement.

I think this is one of the first times Juno has show us even a tiny bit of cloud evolution, information that is essential for gaining a true understanding of Jupiter’s slightly less than 2000 mile deep atmosphere. To see it, go to the link. As Eichstadt notes, “Individual images are noisy, but we see cloud motion.”

When you watch, zoom in on the upper right quarter. This is the area that the cloud motion is seen best.

The uncertainty of science: New results from Juno reveal that the jet-stream-type bands visible on the surface extend down to 1,900 miles, deeper than expected. Below that,

…the planet rotates nearly as a rigid body.”This is really an amazing result, and future measurements by Juno will help us understand how the transition works between the weather layer and the rigid body below,” said Tristan Guillot, a Juno co-investigator from the Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France, and lead author of the paper on Jupiter’s deep interior. “Juno’s discovery has implications for other worlds in our solar system and beyond. Our results imply that the outer differentially-rotating region should be at least three times deeper in Saturn and shallower in massive giant planets and brown dwarf stars.”

Scientists had not expected the atmosphere go that deep.

Other results show that that the gas giant’s complex polar regions are surprising as well.

Its north pole is dominated by a central cyclone surrounded by eight circumpolar cyclones with diameters ranging from 2,500 to 2,900 miles (4,000 to 4,600 kilometers) across. Jupiter’s south pole also contains a central cyclone, but it is surrounded by five cyclones with diameters ranging from 3,500 to 4,300 miles (5,600 to 7,000 kilometers) in diameter. Almost all the polar cyclones, at both poles, are so densely packed that their spiral arms come in contact with adjacent cyclones. However, as tightly spaced as the cyclones are, they have remained distinct, with individual morphologies over the seven months of observations detailed in the paper.

“The question is, why do they not merge?” said Adriani. “We know with Cassini data that Saturn has a single cyclonic vortex at each pole. We are beginning to realize that not all gas giants are created equal.”

I am always baffled when scientists are surprised at the infinite variety of the universe. It is absurd to assume Jupiter and Saturn would be alike, especially considering the history of solar system exploration since the dawn of the space age. Since the first probe got a close look at the Moon, every single new object observed has been completely different from every other previously observed object. Every object has been unique. None have been the same.

Jupiter should be no different. And I guarantee that the next fifty gas giants we finally get a close look at out there among the stars will be as different from each other as they are from Jupiter. It is going to take a lot of exploration for us to finally get a handle on the overall patterns of planetary formation.

Cool movie time! Using Juno images, a citizen scientist has created a short movie showing two complete rotations of Jupiter’s south polar regions. I have embedded the movie below the fold. It is definitely worth watching. As he notes,

Due to Jupiter’s low axial tilt we never see more than roughly one half of the area around the poles in sunlight at any given time. However, it is interesting to see what Jupiter’s polar regions would look like if things were different and a big area around the poles was illuminated. This rotation movie shows what Jupiter’s south polar region would look like near the time of southern summer solstice if Jupiter’s axial tilt was much greater than it is, i.e. comparable to Saturn’s axial tilt.

He also notes the puzzling fact that, though Jupiter and Saturn are both gas giants, unlike Saturn Jupiter does not have a vortex at its poles. In fact, he points out how none of Jupiter’s storms are centered at the pole. Why one gas giant should have such pole-centered vortexes while another does not is a big mystery that illustrates how very little we know about planetary formation and evolution.

The two rotations also do not show any changes in the storms, not because they aren’t changing but because the images used were taken over too short a time span to show this.
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Cool image time! The image above, reduced in resolution to post here, was taken during Juno’s ninth close fly-by of Jupiter in late October, and shows one particular storm swirl in the gas giant’s southern hemisphere.

The Juno team today highlighted an image taken during this fly-by of Jupiter’s entire southern hemisphere, but I find this close-up more interesting. Be sure to check out the full resolution version. It appears to me that the white swirls have risen up above the gold and blue regions, casting shadows down upon them.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you the scale of this storm, as the release does not give any details, including where in the full hemisphere image it is located. I suspect, however, that it is large enough to likely cover the Earth.

Both the full hemisphere image and the image above were processed by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran.

Another citizen scientist who goes by the moniker of mesno has uploaded a spectacular 3D anaglyph of one of Juno’s images of Jupiter.

I could post it here, but I’d have to reduce its resolution, and I don’t think this will work well. If you have red-blue anaglyph 3D glasses the image does a great job of showing the differing vertical heights of Jupiter’s many horizontal bands, especially since it exaggerates the vertical scale significantly to bring out these differences.

Mesno has done three other anaglyphs. Check them out. The image of the Great Red Spot really shows how this is a vast whirlpool boring deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere.