Researchers take closer look into Jupiter’s weather

NASA and Gemini probe deeper into Jupiter’s atmosphere, which has led to further weather discoveries on the planet.

Using the Juno spacecraft, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, a team of researchers were able to capture Jupiter’s storms 500 million miles away in the solar system, according to a NASA press release.

“We want to know how Jupiter's atmosphere works," Michael Wong, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the press release.

Led by Wong, the researchers include Amy Simon, with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Imke de Pater also of UC Berkeley.

The team was able to study Jupiter’s weather by using close-up views from Juno’s orbit around the planet every 53 days and by combining high-resolution multi-wavelength observations from Hubble and Gemini.

“Because we now routinely have these high-resolution views from a couple of different observatories and wavelengths, we are learning so much more about Jupiter's weather,” Simon said in the press release. “This is our equivalent of a weather satellite. We can finally start looking at weather cycles.”

Thunderheads on Jupiter reach 40 miles from the base to the top, which is five times taller than Earth’s, with lightning flashes up to three times more energetic, according to the release. Much like Earth’s lightning, Jupiter’s lightning bolts act like radio transmitters and are known as sferics and whistlers, when send out radio waves and visible light.

“Juno's microwave radiometer probes deep into the planet's atmosphere by detecting high-frequency radio waves that can penetrate through the thick cloud layers,” Simon said in the press release. “The data from Hubble and Gemini can tell us how thick the clouds are and how deep we are seeing into the clouds.”

Lighting outbreaks are associated with a three-way combination of clouds, according to the researchers. Connecting lightning with deep water clouds gives them a tool for estimating the amount of water in Jupiter’s atmosphere, leading to an understanding of how Jupiter and other gas and ice planets within the solar system were formed. 

These findings and continued regular imaging of Jupiter contribute to findings in characteristics of atmospheric waves, changes in wind patterns and the circulation of various gases in the atmosphere, according to NASA and the European Space Agency.

“What's important is that we've managed to collect this huge data set that supports the Juno mission. There are so many applications of the data set that we may not even anticipate. So, we're going to enable other people to do science without that barrier of having to figure out on their own how to process the data," Wong said in the release.

All processed data from the Hubble and Gemini observations are accessible to other researchers through the Mikulski Archives for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.