Juno reveals unprecedented insights into Jupiter

The early results from NASA’s Juno Mission showed that Jupiter is in fact a complex, enormous and chaotic world with Earth-sized cyclones, plunging storm systems that go deep down the heart of the gas giant, and a massive and lumpy magnetic field.

The Juno program executive at NASA Diane Brown shared, “We are excited to share these early discoveries, which help us better understand what makes Jupiter so fascinating. It was a long trip to get to Jupiter, but these first results already demonstrate it was well worth the journey.”

Juno was launched back on August 5, 2011 and entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. The results from their first data collection are already published in various papers including Journal Science.

Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator informed, “We knew, going in, that Jupiter would throw us some curves. But now that we are here we are finding that Jupiter can throw the heat, as well as knuckleballs and sliders. There is so much going on here that we didn’t expect that we have had to take a step back and begin to rethink of this as a whole new Jupiter.”

Juno’s imager JunoCam provided images that depicted both of the planet’s poles were covered in Earth-sized swirling storms which are clustered densely and rub together, reported NASA.

Bolton expressed, “We’re puzzled as to how they could be formed, how stable the configuration is, and why Jupiter’s north pole doesn’t look like the south pole. We’re questioning whether this is a dynamic system, and are we seeing just one stage, and over the next year, we’re going to watch it disappear, or is this a stable configuration and these storms are circulating around one another?”

Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) data showed the zones and iconic belts of Jupiter as mysterious. It shows that ammonia is variable and continues to rise as far down the MWR showed which was a few hundred miles.

Rejecting all previous researches, the findings also suggested that Jupiter’s magnetic field is way stronger than expected models and are more irregular shape-wise. The data revealed that the magnetic field highly goes beyond expectations at 7.766 Gauss which is almost 10 times stronger than Earth’s strongest magnetic field found. SciTech Daily reports Juno’s deputy principal Jack Connerney saying, “Juno is giving us a view of the magnetic field close to Jupiter that we’ve never had before. Already we see that the magnetic field looks lumpy: it is stronger in some places and weaker in others. This uneven distribution suggests that the field might be generated by dynamo action closer to the surface, above the layer of metallic hydrogen. Every flyby we execute gets us closer to determining where and how Jupiter’s dynamo works.”

Amazingly, Juno also showed that the planet’s auroral emissions were because of particles that pick up energy that slams into molecules in the atmosphere, a process which is different from Earth.