The largest planet in our solar system is increasingly looking like a work of art. It’s full of surprises – just like its moons.
NASA’s Juno mission, which began orbiting Jupiter in July 2016, recently made its 38th overflight on the gas giant. The mission was extended earlier this year, adding in June an overflight by Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.
Data and images from these flights are rewriting everything we know about Jupiter, said Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the Juno mission at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, during a meeting at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting held on Friday. in New Orleans.
Bolton revealed 50 seconds of sound created when Juno flew over Ganymede during the summer. The moon’s audio clip was created by electrical and magnetic radio waves produced by the planet’s magnetic field and picked up by the spacecraft’s Waves instrument, which is designed to detect those waves. The sounds are like a space age soundtrack.
“This soundtrack is wild enough to make you feel like you’re riding alongside Juno as she (the probe) passes through Ganymede for the first time in over two decades,” said Bolton. “If you listen carefully, you can hear the abrupt shift to higher frequencies near the middle of the recording, which represents entry into a different region of Ganymede’s magnetosphere.”
The Juno team continues to analyze Ganymede flyover data. At the time, Juno was about 1,038 kilometers (645 miles) from the surface of the moon and rotating at 67,000 kilometers per hour (41,600 miles per hour).
“It is possible that the change in frequency right after the closest approach is due to the shift from the night side to the day side of Ganymede,” Waves instrument principal co-finder William Kurth, who works at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. in Iowa City.
The team also shared stunning new images that resemble artistic visions of Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere.
“You can see how incredibly beautiful Jupiter is,” Bolton said. “It really is an artist’s palette. It’s almost like a Van Gogh painting. You see these amazing vortexes and swirling clouds of different colors.”
These visually stunning images help scientists better understand Jupiter and its many mysteries. Images of cyclones at Jupiter’s poles intrigue Lia Siegelman, a scientist working with the Juno mission team who regularly studies Earth’s oceans. She saw similarities between Jupiter’s atmospheric dynamics and the vortices in Earth’s oceans.
“When I saw the richness of the turbulence around the Jovian cyclones, with all the filaments and minor eddies, it reminded me of the turbulence you see in the ocean around the eddies,” wrote Siegelman, physical oceanographer and postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
“This is especially evident in high-resolution satellite imagery of vortices in Earth’s oceans, which are revealed by plankton blooms that act as flow trackers.”
Mapping Jupiter’s Magnetic Field
Juno data is also helping scientists map Jupiter’s magnetic field, including the Great Blue Spot. This region is a magnetic anomaly located at the equator of Jupiter – not to be confused with the Great Red Spot, an atmospheric storm that persists for centuries south of the equator.
Since Juno’s arrival on Jupiter, the team has witnessed a shift in the planet’s magnetic field. The Great Blue Spot is moving east at about 5.1 centimeters per second and will complete a circle around the planet in 350 years.
Meanwhile, the Great Red Spot is moving west and will make the full turn much faster, in about 4.5 years.
But the Great Blue Spot is being destroyed by Jupiter’s jets, which give it a striped appearance. This visual pattern tells scientists that these winds extend much deeper into the planet’s gaseous interior.
The Jupiter magnetic field map, generated by Juno data, also revealed that the action of the planet’s dynamo, which creates the magnetic field from Jupiter’s interior, originates from metallic hydrogen beneath a layer of “helium rain”.
Juno was also able to check the very faint ring of dust around Jupiter from inside the ring. This dust is actually created by two of the planet’s small moons, called Metis and Adrastea. The observations allowed researchers to see part of the Perseus constellation from a different planetary perspective.
“It’s amazing that we can see these familiar constellations from a spacecraft half a billion miles away,” wrote Heidi Becker, principal instrument co-investigator at the Juno Star Reference Unit at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. .
“But everything looks very much the same as when we enjoyed them from our backyard here on Earth. It’s an inspiring reminder of how small we are and how much more there is to explore.”
In the fall of 2022, Jupiter will fly across the planet’s moon Europa, which will be visited by its own Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch in 2024. Europa intrigues scientists because a global ocean lies beneath its ice shell . Occasionally, feathers are ejected into space from holes in the ice. Europa Clipper will be able to investigate this ocean “tasting” and flying through the plumes – and discover if life is possible in this oceanic world.
This content was originally created in English.
original version
Reference: CNN Brasil
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