![]() ![]() “But this is not what’s happening,” said Tristan Guillot, director of research at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France and a co-investigator on the mission. Scientists had expected that beneath the ammonia ice clouds, the churning winds of Jupiter would mix the ammonia gas evenly throughout the atmosphere. Seemingly paradoxically, the ammonia is also key to explaining why there is so little ammonia in the same swaths of the atmosphere where the lightning occurs. The water-ammonia droplets then collide with additional ice crystals flung up from below, building electrical charge to generate lightning. High up, the water ice crystals mix with the ammonia vapors and melt. “Jupiter has incredibly violent storms that can fling up water ice particles from below at 100, 200 miles per hour and get to these very high altitudes,” Dr. The key to unraveling this mystery was ammonia in the atmosphere, which acted as an antifreeze. Becker, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California who is the lead for Juno’s radiation monitoring research, was “Uh oh, what’s wrong?” When she first saw the flashes, the reaction of Heidi N. Within the water clouds, lightning probably occurs much as in thunderstorms on Earth, fueled by the collision of water droplets with ice crystals that build up electrical charge.īut the dim, never-before-detected flashes that Juno spotted were higher up in the atmosphere, where temperatures, about minus-125 degrees Fahrenheit, are far too cold for water to remain a liquid. But Jupiter’s water clouds - where lightning observed by earlier spacecraft appeared to originate - are 30 to 40 miles deeper than the cloud tops. ![]() The colorful, swirling stripes of Jupiter are just the tops of the highest clouds, which are made of frozen ammonia crystals coated with soot. Those orbits will also provide closer observations of the perplexing lightning high in the atmosphere. “We tested a little bit with different dynamics of the north and the south,” he said, in order to understand why the two poles have different numbers of storms. The atmospheric patterns in the top half of Jupiter differ from those of the bottom half. “There is this magic number that can make them fit.” ![]() “But if you had 100, then that would be too close, and they wouldn’t be stable,” he said. Two storms would easily fit in a polar region without disrupting each other, said Yohai Kaspi, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and a co-investigator on the mission. Why do the storms, which last for years and are all about 2,500 miles in diameter, appear to remain constant in number? Hansen-Koharcheck, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., who is responsible for the operation of the spacecraft’s primary camera, JunoCam. “It’s like five bullies on the playground, right?” said Candice J. The additional orbits of the extended mission will also enable further investigations of the mysteries that Juno has revealed, like the rings of storms at the north and south poles - eight storms around the north pole, five around the south pole.Īt one point, it looked as if a sixth storm was entering the group at the south pole, but then it was pushed away. The mission’s discoveries include lightning higher up than thought possible, rings of stable storms at the north and south poles, and winds extending so deep into the interior that they might push around the planet’s magnetic fields. Jupiter is essentially a big ball of mostly hydrogen, but it has turned out to be a pretty complicated ball. Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, who is the mission’s principal investigator. “Basically, we designed and built an armored tank,” said Scott J. Last week, it zipped past Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. It is now finishing its primary mission, but NASA has granted it a four-year extension and 42 more orbits. ![]() The spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016, and has survived bombardment from intense radiation at the largest of the solar system’s planets. For something that was to have been done and thrown away three years ago, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has a busy schedule ahead exploring Jupiter and its big moons. ![]()
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