Dept. of Geosciences Colloquium: The Juno mission to Jupiter: what's inside the gas giant?

Abstract:

NASA's Juno mission has been orbiting Jupiter since July 2016, measuring in detail the planet’s magnetosphere, atmosphere and interior. In this talk, we will review the mission and its main science results, including the discovery of compact polar cyclones, surprising asymmetries in its magnetic field, a deep atmosphere and a dilute interior core. Particularly we will focus on the Juno gravity experiment, which revealed that the gravity field of Jupiter is north-south asymmetric. This allowed us to determine the depth and vertical structure of Jupiter’s strong east-west flows, and how they relate at the cloud-level to the observed belts and zones. We will also discuss what the gravity results imply about the origin of the zonal flows, and how they interact with Jupiter’s magnetic field. The recent Cassini Grand Finale gravity results yielded similar information for Saturn, giving an opportunity to compare the two gas giants and learn about the physical mechanisms controlling them both.

Event Organizers: Dr. Roy Barkan and Dr. Asaf Inbal