The NASA Juno mission, which began orbiting Jupiter in July 2016, recently took its 38th close-up of the gas giant. The mission was extended earlier this year, adding a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede in June.
The data and images from these flybys are rewriting everything we know about Jupiter, Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said during a briefing at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans on Friday.
There, Bolton revealed 50 seconds of sound created when Juno flew past Ganymede over the summer. The clip of the moon’s sound is made by electrical and magnetic radio waves produced 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 trippy soundtrack from the space age.
“This soundtrack is just wild enough to make you feel like you’re riding along as Juno sails past Ganymede for the first time in over two decades,” said Bolton. “If you listen closely, you can hear the abrupt change to higher frequencies around the center of the recording, which represents entry into another region of Ganymede’s magnetosphere.”
The Juno team continues to analyze the data from the Ganymede flyby. At the time, Juno was about 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) from the moon’s surface, flying past at 41,600 mph (67,000 kilometers per hour).
“It is possible that the change in frequency shortly after the closest approach is due to the passage from the night side to the day side of Ganymede,” said William Kurth, co-principal investigator of the Waves instrument, who is based at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, in a statement.
The team also shared stunning new images resembling artistic images of Jupiter’s swirling atmosphere.
“You can see how incredibly beautiful Jupiter is,” Bolton said. “It’s really an artist’s palette. This is almost a Van Gogh painting. You can see these incredible eddies and swirling clouds of different colors.”
This visually stunning images serve to help scientists better understand Jupiter and its many mysteries. Images of cyclones at Jupiter’s poles intrigued Lia Siegelman, a scientist working with the Juno team that typically studies Earth’s oceans. She saw similarities between Jupiter’s atmospheric dynamics and the eddies in Earth’s oceans.
“When I saw the richness of the turbulence around the Jovian cyclones, with all the filaments and smaller eddies, it reminded me of the turbulence you see in the ocean around eddies,” said Siegelman, a physical oceanographer and postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Institution. of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in a statement.
“These are especially evident in high-resolution satellite images of eddies in Earth’s oceans revealed by plankton blooms that act as tracers of the flow.”
Mapping Jupiter’s Magnetic Field
Juno’s data is also helping scientists map Jupiter’s magnetic field, including the Great Blue Spot. This area is a magnetic anomaly on Jupiter’s equator – not to be confused with the Great Red Spot, a centuries-long atmospheric storm south of the equator.
Since Juno’s arrival at Jupiter, the team has witnessed a change in Jupiter’s magnetic field. The Great Blue Spot is moving about 5 centimeters to the east per second and will orbit the planet in 350 years.
Meanwhile, the Great Red Spot is moving west and will pass that finish line much faster, in about 4.5 years.
But the Great Blue Spot is being pulled apart by Jupiter’s jet streams, giving it a striated appearance. This visual 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 also revealed that the planet’s dynamo action, which creates the magnetic field from within Jupiter, comes from metallic hydrogen under a layer of “helium rain.”
Juno was also able to view the very faint dust ring around Jupiter from within. This dust is actually created by two of the planet’s small moons, called Metis and Adrastea. The observations allowed the researchers to view part of the constellation Perseus from a different planetary perspective.
“It’s breathtaking that we can gaze at these familiar constellations from a spacecraft half a billion miles away,” said Heidi Becker, lead co-investigator of Juno’s Stellar Reference Unit instrument at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. statement .
“But everything looks pretty much the same as when we appreciate them from our backyards here on Earth. It’s an awe-inspiring reminder of how small we are and how much there is still to discover.”