Juno Flybe reveals stunning new images of Jupiter

(CNN) – The largest planet in our solar system seems to be looking more and more like a work of art. It is full of surprises, just like its moons. the a task NASA’s Juno, which began orbiting Jupiter in July 2016, recently made its 38th close flyby of the gas giant. The mission was extended earlier this year, with the addition of a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede in June.

Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator, said: southwest research institute In San Antonio, during a briefing at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans on Friday.

There, Bolton revealed 50 seconds of sound created when Juno flew past Ganymede over the summer. The moon’s sound clip was generated by electrical and magnetic radio waves generated by the planet’s magnetic field and picked up by the spacecraft’s Waves instrument, designed to detect these waves.

The sounds are like a space age soundtrack.

“This soundtrack is wild enough to make you feel like you’re riding as Juno sails alongside Ganymede for the first time in over two decades,” Bolton said. “If you listen carefully, you can hear the sudden shift to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which is the entrance to a different region in the Ganymede magnetosphere.”

The Juno team continues to analyze data from the Ganymede flyby. At the time, Juno was about 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) from the moon’s surface, exceeding 41,600 miles per hour (67,000 kilometers per hour).

William Kurth, co-principal investigator for the Waves tool, based at California State University, Iowa, said in a statement.

The team also shared stunning new images that look like artistic views of Jupiter’s swirling atmosphere.

“You can see how beautiful Jupiter is,” Bolton said. “It’s really an artist’s color palette. It’s almost like a Van Gogh painting. You see these wonderful swirls and swirling clouds of different colours.”

These stunning images help scientists better understand Jupiter and its many mysteries. Pictures of hurricanes at the poles of Jupiter intrigued Leah Siegelman, a scientist working with the Juno team who usually studies Earth’s oceans. He saw parallels between the dynamics of Jupiter’s atmosphere and the eddies in Earth’s oceans.

“When I saw the richness of the turbulence around cyclones Jovian, with all the threads and smaller eddies, it reminded me of the turbulence you see in the ocean around the eddies,” said Siegelman, a physical oceanographer and postdoctoral fellow at Scripps. at the University of California, San Diego, in a statement.

This is particularly evident in high-resolution satellite images of eddies in Earth’s oceans revealed by plankton blooms that act as flow trackers.

Mapping the magnetic field of Jupiter

Juno’s data also helps scientists determine Jupiter’s magnetic field, including the Great Blue Spot. This region is a magnetic anomaly located at Jupiter’s equator, not to be confused with the Great Red Spot, an atmospheric storm that has persisted for centuries south of the equator.

Since Juno’s arrival at Jupiter, the team has seen a change in Jupiter’s magnetic field. The Great Blue Spot is moving east at 2 inches (5.1 cm) per second and will complete one revolution around the planet in 350 years.

Meanwhile, the Great Red Spot is moving west and will cross the finish line faster, in about 4.5 years.

But the Great Blue Spot is riven by the jet streams of Jupiter, giving it a striped appearance. This visible pattern tells scientists that these winds extend much deeper into the planet’s gaseous interior.

The map of Jupiter’s magnetic field, generated by Juno data, revealed that the motion of the planet’s dynamo, which creates the magnetic field inside Jupiter, originates from metallic hydrogen under a layer of helium “rain”.

Juno was also able to notice a faint ring of dust around Jupiter from within the ring. This dust is actually made up of two of the planet’s small moons, called Metis and Adrastea. The observations allowed the researchers to see part of the constellation Perseus from a different planetary perspective.

“It’s impressive that we can view these familiar constellations from a spacecraft half a billion miles away,” Heidi Becker, associate principal investigator for the Juno Stellar Reference Module at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

“But it all looks pretty much the same when we appreciate them from our own backyards here on Earth. It’s a frightening reminder of how small we are and how much we still have to explore.”

In the fall of 2022, Jupiter will fly close to Jupiter’s moon Europa, which will be visited by its special mission, Europa Clipper, which will launch in 2024. Europa is of interest to scientists because the global ocean is located under the ice sheet. From time to time, feathers come out of the holes in the ice into space. The Europa Clipper can explore this ocean by “testing” and flying through the feathers, seeing if life is possible in this ocean world.