Category Archives: Gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, et al

Europa, Titan, & other deep space sites, Gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, et al

Snapshots from deep space: Jupiter’s many colors, kinks in Saturn’s rings, & clouds on Titan

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Some recent imagery from NASA spacecraft:

** Jupiter’s Clouds of Many Colors | NASA  (Click for larger image)

NASA’s Juno spacecraft was racing away from Jupiter following its seventh close pass of the planet when JunoCam snapped this image on May 19, 2017, from about 29,100 miles (46,900 kilometers) above the cloud tops. The spacecraft was over 65.9 degrees south latitude, with a lovely view of the south polar region of the planet.

This image was processed to enhance color differences, showing the amazing variety in Jupiter’s stormy atmosphere. The result is a surreal world of vibrant color, clarity and contrast. Four of the white oval storms known as the “String of Pearls” are visible near the top of the image. Interestingly, one orange-colored storm can be seen at the belt-zone boundary, while other storms are more of a cream color.

JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at:  www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam

More information about Juno is at: http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt /Seán Doran

** Cassini: The Grand Finale: Grooves and Kinks in the Rings (Click for larger image)

Many of the features seen in Saturn’s rings are shaped by the planet’s moons. This view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows two different effects of moons that cause waves in the A ring and kinks in the F ring.

The A ring, which takes up most of the image on the left side, displays waves caused by orbital resonances with moons that orbit beyond the rings. Kinks, clumps and other structures in the F ring (the small, narrow ring at right) can be caused by interactions between the ring particles and the moon Prometheus, which orbits just interior to the ring, as well as collisions between small objects within the ring itself.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 22 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 22, 2017.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 63,000 miles (101,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 7 degrees. Image scale is 1,979 feet (603 meters) per pixel.

** Cassini: The Grand Finale: Northern Summer on Titan (Click for larger image)

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sees bright methane clouds drifting in the summer skies of Saturn’s moon Titan, along with dark hydrocarbon lakes and seas clustered around the north pole.

Compared to earlier in Cassini’s mission, most of the surface in the moon’s northern high latitudes is now illuminated by the sun. (See here for a view of the northern hemisphere from 2007.) Summer solstice in the Saturn system occurred on May 24, 2017.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2017, using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. Cassini obtained the view at a distance of about 315,000 miles (507,000 kilometers) from Titan.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and https://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

 

Gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, et al, Mars, Space Science

Video: “The Golden Age of Exploration” – Talk by NASA JPL director Charles Elachi

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Charles Elachi, Caltech professor and JPL director (2001-2016),

describes the excitement and impact of discoveries made by JPL’s robotic missions at destinations around the solar system and beyond over the past 15 years—from rovers and orbiters at Mars to Cassini at Saturn to discoveries about planets around other stars.

 

Gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, et al, Multiple media

Videos: Ride along with Juno as it flies by Jupiter’s swirling clouds

The Juno probe is in a wide elliptical orbit around Jupiter that sends it way out into space far from the gas giant at one end of the ellipse and then down close to the cloud tops at the other. Below are videos showing imagery of Jupiter, enhanced to bring out the cloud patterns, as if one were riding on the spacecraft during its most recent two passes close to the planet:

Here is a diagram of Juno’s orbit:

The orbit lasts 53.5 days. The original plan was to fire the spacecraft’s main engine to make the orbit more circular and smaller so that it  lasted only 14 days (shown by the set of green-blue orbits in the diagram). However, problems with the engine valves led mission managers to decide it was safest to leave the spacecraft in the original wide orbit.

When a satellite is in orbit around earth, the two extremes of the orbital ellipse are referred to as apogee (farthest from earth) and perigee (closest to earth). As explained in the Oxford dictionary, “gee” derives as follows:

from French apogée or modern Latin apogaeum, from Greek apogaion (diastēma), ‘(distance) away from earth’, from apo ‘from’ + gaia, gē ‘earth’.

So for an orbit around Jupiter, the terms have been replaced with apojove and perijove, using the Latin word Jove for Jupiter.

Note that it was discovered by Kepler that orbits were ellipses rather than circles. He also noticed that an object in orbit around a large body will move fastest at the low point and slowest at the high point in the ellipse. (Newton later used his calculus math tools with the laws of motion and the inverse squared law of gravity to explain these key features of orbital mechanics.) So Juno’s passes above the cloud tops very quickly at perijove and then takes a long slow trip up to apojove and back.

Gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, et al

First science from Juno at Jupiter

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NASA JPL is holding a live telecon at 2:00 pm EDT on the initial science results from the Juno probe in orbit around Jupiter:

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory invites you to watch live about everything from Mars rovers to monitoring asteroids to cool cosmic discoveries. From the lab to the lecture hall, get information directly from scientists and engineers working on NASA’s latest missions. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

More at NASA to Discuss First Science Results from Juno Mission to Jupiter | Mission Juno

Visuals will be posted at the start of the event at: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/junoteleconference

Audio of the briefing will stream live at: http://www.nasa.gov/live

It will also be streamed live on: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

More information on the Juno mission is available at: https://www.nasa.gov/juno

This image shows Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). The oval features are cyclones, up to 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter. Multiple images taken with the JunoCam instrument on three separate orbits were combined to show all areas in daylight, enhanced color, and stereographic projection. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles [Large image]
New results released today: Jupiter’s secrets revealed by NASA probe : Nature News & Comment

A deep ammonia plume and a powerful magnetic field are among the many surprises uncovered by the Juno mission.

The sharpest look yet at Jupiter has revealed a number of surprises — including a surge of ammonia welling up from its gassy depths, a startlingly powerful magnetic field and what could be a large, but poorly defined, core.

NASA’s Juno mission began to capture these insights on 27 August last year, during the first of a series of close swoops past the planet. Preliminary results appeared on 25 May in Science and Geophysical Research Letters.

 

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Gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, et al, Multiple media

Juno: Completes 5th low pass over Jupiter + More citizen scientist images

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Citizen scientist Bjorn Jonsson made this beautiful picture of a spot on Jupiter by applying image processing techniques on an photo taken by the Juno spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around the gas giant.

This enhanced color view of Jupiter’s cloud tops was processed by citizen scientist Bjorn Jonsson using data from the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The image highlights a massive counterclockwise rotating storm that appears as a white oval in the gas giant’s southern hemisphere. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech /SwRI /MSSS/Bjorn Jonsson Juno acquired this image on Feb. 2, 2017, at 6:13 a.m. PDT (9:13 a.m. EDT), as the spacecraft performed a close flyby of Jupiter. When the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) from the planet. [Large version]
And another Juno image from someone with the tag: Ossietzky-68:

JUPITER’S EYES  –  Ossietzky-68.  Three storms in row on Jupiters atmosphere resembles eyes on the planet.  Mission Phase : PERIJOVE 6. 2017-05-23 03:11 UT Credit : NASA, Juno © PUBLIC DOMAIN

Raw images from JunoCam that the public can examine and process are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam

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Juno is in long elliptical orbit that brings in periodically in close to the surface of Jupiter. Last week the spacecraft completed the fifth such pass above the clouds:

NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Completes Fifth Science Pass of Jupiter

Updated May 19, 2017, at 1:30 p.m. PDT: NASA’s Juno mission accomplished a close flyby of Jupiter on May 19, successfully completing its fifth science orbit.

All of Juno’s science instruments and the spacecraft’s JunoCam were operating during the flyby, collecting data that is now being returned to Earth. Juno’s next close flyby of Jupiter will occur on July 11, 2017, taking it over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft will make its fifth science flyby over Jupiter’s mysterious cloud tops on Thursday, May 18, at 11 p.m. PDT (Friday, May 19, 2 a.m. EDT and 6:00 UTC). At the time of perijove (defined as the point in Juno’s orbit when it is closest to the planet’s center), the spacecraft will have logged 63.5 million miles (102 million kilometers) in Jupiter’s orbit and will be about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) above the planet’s cloud tops.

Juno launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. During its mission of exploration, Juno soars low over the planet’s cloud tops — as close as about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) During these flybys, Juno is probing beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and studying its auroras to learn more about the planet’s origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California.

More information on the Juno mission is available at:

The public can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:

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