The violent nature of Jupiter’s atmosphere has long been a source of fascination for scientists. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has had a ringside seat to the goings-on since it entered the orbit around the gas giant in 2016. During flybys of Jupiter, a suite of science instruments has peered below its turbulent cloud deck to uncover how the gas giant works from the inside out. One way the Juno mission learns about the planet’s interior is via radio science. Using NASA’s Deep Space Network antennas, planetary scientists track the spacecraft’s radio signal as Juno flies past Jupiter at speeds near 209,000 kph (130,000 mph), measuring tiny changes in its velocity. Those changes are caused by variations in the planet’s gravity field, and by measuring them, the mission can essentially see into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Such measurements have led to numerous discoveries, including the existence of a dilute core deep within Jupiter and the depth of the planet’s zones and belts, which extend from the cloud tops down approximately 3,000 km (1,860 miles).
To determine the location and cylindrical nature of the Jovian winds, Juno scientist Ryan Park and colleagues applied a mathematical technique that models gravitational variations and surface elevations of rocky planets like Earth.
At Jupiter, the technique can be used to accurately map winds at depth.
Using the high-precision Juno data, the researchers were able to generate a four-fold increase in the resolution over previous models created with data from NASA’s Jovian explorers Voyager and Galileo.
“We applied a constraining technique developed for sparse data sets on terrestrial planets to process the Juno data. This is the first time such a technique has been applied to an outer planet,” said Dr. Park, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The measurements of the gravity field matched a two-decade-old model that determined Jupiter’s powerful east-west zonal flows extend from the…
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