Juno Mission Reveals About Atmosphere of Jupiter

A NASA spacecraft reveals the best-ever 3D model of the largest planet of our solar system. The Juno Mission is using its second extended phase to peer far into the clouds of Jupiter, using a polar-orbiting view that no previous spacecraft was able to access.

Juno Mission results in the early phase of the extension which started this year and will go to 2025, if the spacecraft outlasts the intense radiation that has been rich so far, investigators said in a news conference Thursday (Oct. 28).  The spacecraft revealed new information on how water behaves far down in the clouds, and why the cyclones at the poles appear so stable.

Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator said that this is going to tell us a lot about how giant planets are throughout the galaxy.The dominating result was learning that the Great Red Spot is far deeper than investigators thought, with the famous storm going as deep as 500 kilometers beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops. The new insight on deep atmospheric processes at Jupiter goes far beyond this single hurricane.

The Juno Mission approach used gravity techniques to uncover the extent of the atmospheric belts and zones at the giant planet, which are detectable thousands of miles or kilometres below the cloud tops. Gravity represents one of the main techniques that we open up the planet and look inside.Measuring the magnetic field has also been useful, because partway down the huge planet’s gas envelope, hydrogen starts to behave like a fluid rather than as a gas, which influences the behavior of the greater atmosphere.