A new gust of discovery from NASA’s Juno Mission Jupiter took us into the world of gas giants Volcanic Moon, IO, and cyclones playing bumper cars at North Jovian Paul.
Juno I’ve arrived at Jupiter The 2016 system, but the failed thruster means that it is trapped in a wide polar orbit that approaches Jupiter and its moon every 53 days. Still, during these flybees, Juno accumulated high-quality data on Jupiter’s atmosphere, including planetary poles that were previously not studied in detail.
In Jupiter’s Arctic there was a stratospheric haze hat, with Juno measured at 52 degrees Fahrenheit (11 degrees Celsius) cooler than the surroundings. Around the polar regions are jet streams that blow faster than 100 mph (161 kph). Under Hayes, the Arctic region is home to one giant cyclone of 1,864 miles (3,000 kilometers) (3,000 kilometers) surrounded by its “groupies.” Earth.
Juno has been using its Junocam and Jovian’s infrared Aurora Mapper (Jiram) since 2016 to track the movement of this cyclone system in visible infrared light and infrared (shaming deep and hot from the atmosphere). These two instruments show that each of the eight cyclones drift towards the pole through a process known as “beta drift.” The same process occurs in cyclones on Earth and is the result of Coriolis forces that interact with the swirling wind patterns belonging to each cyclone. However, on Earth, cyclones never reach the poles. That’s because the closer they get to the cold and dry poles, the more they often escape from the warm, humid air that gives them energy. On Jupiter, the atmospheric dynamics are different, and this is not a problem. However, once they reach the pole, Jupiter’s cyclones begin to collide with each other.
“These competing forces “bomber off each other” cyclones in ways reminiscent of a spring of mechanical systems,” said Johai Caspi, a co-researcher at Juno at the Wiseman Institute of Science in Israel. statement. “This interaction not only stabilizes the entire configuration, but also causes the cyclone to vibrate around its central position. It drifts slowly west, clockwise, around the pole.”
Meanwhile, apart from the Jupiter vibe, Junho has recently made a repeat flyby of the innermost Giovan Moon. io – The most volcanic body in the solar system.
During IO’s Juno’s Flyby on December 27th, 2024, the spaceship was Most energetic volcanic eruptions I’ve recorded it on IO. When Junho returns on March 2nd, the volcano is still spitting out the lava and is expected to be still active during Junho’s next flyby, which will take place on May 6th at a distance of 55,300 miles (89,000 km) from the surface of IO.
But what the Juno science team is excited about is what lies beneath the surface of the IO. By combining the spacecraft’s microwave radiometer (MWR) with the Ziram, scientists were able to measure the underground temperature of the IO, revealing the existence of underground magma flows.
“The Juno Science team loves to combine very different datasets of very different instruments and see what we can learn,” said Shannon Brown of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “When we incorporated the MWR data into the infrared images of JIRAM, we were amazed at what we saw. Evidence of still warm magma that hasn’t yet solidified under the cooling crust of the IO. There was a flow of cooling lava at all latitudes and longitudes.”
Junho previously I’ve excluded There is the presence of a large ocean of magma beneath the surface of the IO, which can feed the volcano, but these cooling, rising flows can explain how the IO volcano erupts. The science team calculates that about 10% of the lunar underground have these cooling flows. This teaches us how heat is transported from the hot interior of an IO to its surface, and how the world frequently resurfaces itself through lava flows that flow onto the ground.
“IO volcanoes, lava fields and underground lava flows act like car radiators, efficiently moving heat from inside to surfaces and cooling in a vacuum in space,” Brown said.
The latest Juno results were presented at the General Assembly of the European Geoscience Union in Vienna on April 29th.
