Author: Christopher Crockett / Source: Science News
Bit by bit, Jupiter is revealing its deepest, darkest secrets.
The latest findings are in from the Juno spacecraft. And they unveil the roots of the planet’s storms, what lies beneath the opaque atmosphere and a striking geometric layout of cyclones parked around the gas giant’s north and south poles.
“We’re at the beginning of dissecting Jupiter,” says Juno mission leader Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. And the picture that’s emerging — still just a sketch — topples many preconceived notions. The results appear in four papers in the March 8 Nature.
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since July 4, 2016, on a mission to map the planet’s interior (SN: 6/25/16, p. 16). The probe loops around once every 53 days, traveling on an elongated orbit that takes the spacecraft from pole to pole and as close as about 4,000 kilometers above the cloud tops.
As it plows through Jupiter’s gravity field, Juno speeds up and slows down in response to shifting masses inside the planet. By measuring these minute accelerations and decelerations, scientists can calculate subtle variations in Jupiter’s gravity and deduce how its mass is distributed. That lets researchers build up a three-dimensional map of the planet’s internal structure.
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