Jupiter awaits arrival of the Juno probe

In a statement you’d never read in Roman mythology, a glowing Jupiter awaits the arrival of Juno—as scientists have created stunning new images and maps of Jupiter a week ahead of the arrival of NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

In fact, the maps are the highest resolution achieved to date of the giant planet, revealing its current temperatures, composition, and cloud coverage. Created using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and a newly-upgraded thermal imager called VISIR, the maps were derived from observations taken during the span of February to June of this year, allowing researchers to better characterize the atmosphere of Jupiter before Juno arrives.

“We used a technique called ‘lucky imaging’, whereby individual sharp frames are extracted from short movies of Jupiter to ‘freeze’ the turbulent motions of our own atmosphere, to create a stunning new image of Jupiter’s cloud layers,” explained Dr. Leigh Fletcher, of the University of Leicester, in a Royal Astronomical Society press release. “At this wavelength, Jupiter’s clouds appear in silhouette against the deep internal glows of the planet. Images of this quality will provide the global context for Juno’s close-up views of the planet at the same wavelength.”

Fletcher and his team also studied how giant storms, vortices, and wave patterns shape the appearance of Jupiter, this time using the EXES spectrograph on NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Hawaii. They made numerous observations across many different wavelengths, allowing them to pinpoint certain features and cloud layers and thus create the first global spectral maps of Jupiter taken from Earth.

“These maps will help set the scene for what Juno will witness in the coming months,” said Fletcher. “We have seen new weather phenomena that have been active on Jupiter throughout 2016.

“These include a widening of one of the brown belts just north of the equator, which has spawned wave patterns throughout the northern hemisphere, both in the cloud layers and high above in the planet’s stratosphere. Observations at different wavelengths across the infrared spectrum allow us to piece together a three-dimensional picture of how energy and material are transported upwards through the atmosphere.”

Other contributors to the project

Of course, Fletcher and his team did not accomplish all this alone; several telescopes in Hawaii and Chile and amateurs from around the world contributed to the project, so that scientists would better understand the climate of Jupiter before Juno arrives.

And once Juno does arrive, it will orbit around Jupiter, skimming to around 3,100 miles (5,000 km) above the planet’s clouds about once every two weeks. The images taken during these close encounters will altogether provide global coverage of the planet.

“The combined efforts of an international team of amateur and professional astronomers have provided us with an incredibly rich dataset over the past eight months,” said Dr. Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who leads the Juno campaign. “Together with the new results from Juno, this dataset will allow researchers to characterise Jupiter’s global thermal structure, cloud cover and distribution of gaseous species. We can then hope to answer questions like what drives Jupiter’s atmospheric changes, and how the weather we see is connected to processes hidden deep within the planet.”

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Image credit: ESA

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