First 2017 JUNO Mission Science Updates

good morning I'm Jane Platt with the newsroom at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California the topic of today's media telecon the very first in-depth science results from NASA's Juno mission Juno arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July 4th of 2016 and today we're going to find out some of its dramatic discoveries about the planet will hear brief presentations from five speakers and then we'll take reporter Q&A if you do have a question please press star 1 to be placed in the queue and you can follow along with the visuals as the speakers give their presentations and answer questions at WWN ASAC OV / feature / juno teleconference one word again wwm sa gov /features /font and reminder that as they go through the images you can click on a picture to get it full screen on your computer I'd like to go ahead and introduce our speakers we'll be hearing from Diane Brown the program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington and they will hear from Scott Bolton the Juno principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and Jachin Ernie the deputy principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland Heidi Becker the Juno radiation monitoring investigation lead here at JPL and candy Hanson the Juno co-investigator at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson Arizona let's start things off with Diane Brown Diane thank you Jane we're very excited to be sharing these first major discoveries from Juno our solar-powered spacecraft orbiting around the king of the planet Juno has now completed five science passes over Jupiter and has provided amazing images and science data members of the public have been actively participating in the mission by using the Juno cam data to produce beautiful and creative images for us all to enjoy and we'll get to see some new ones today you know launched in August of 2011 and is one of three currently operating missions within NASA's new frontiers program as Jane mentioned the Juno team got to celebrate with our own fireworks last 4th of July when we got into orbit around Jupiter the results being announced today are just the beginning as we look forward to even more exciting science as we go forward I'm not going to hand it off to Scott to provide the science highlights ok thanks Diane it's great to be here it's exciting to be able to share what we've learned from some of these first passes by Jupiter really excited to tell you all the news that we've got so I'd like to talk first to the first image Scott Holton one and so here I'm going to illustrate really how Juna works so Juno slides over the poles of Jupiter and it goes very very close to Jupiter just within a few thousand miles of the cloud tops it's traveling very very fast it takes only about two hours to screen past Jupiter so the way it really works is every 53 days we screen by Jupiter drop it down from the North Pole and going out of the south and we're going so fast that that whole paths from North Pole to South cold about two hours long and almost most of our science is collected during these very close passes and that's really what's unique about Juno is because we get so close to Jupiter and we cross over both poles that that allows us to see very new things and unique things about the interior and how the magnetosphere works and so today what you'll hear is what we really learned from our first two close passes by Jupiter will also share some more recent data including our latest images that came down last week some observations of interplanetary dust and Jupiter's rings and you'll hear are some recent sounds from Jupiter that are actually quite unique so I'd like well true that the general theme of our discoveries is really how different Jupiter looks from what we expected so Juno invert in many ways is looking inside of Jupiter for the first time and close up and personal and what scientists expected was that Juno was Jupiter was relatively boring it's uniform inside and for decades scientists have assumed this that if we drop below the cloud tops to below where the sunlight reaches that pretty much Jupiter was all uniform inside and it really didn't matter where you looked it would all look the same and what we're finding is anything but that is the truth it's very different very complex and we're going to share those with you today so I'd like to go over to slide two Scott Bolton - and here you see an incredibly beautiful picture of the North Pole of Jupiter this is created by amateurs that sign on to the Juno website and make our images for it this one is unique in the sense that each time we pass over Jupiter because we're going over the poles it's half sunlit half dark 1/2 night sight and what somebody has done here is they to actually stitch together pictures from different close passes of Jupiter so that you could see the whole thing sunlit and what you see is incredibly you know just complex features the cyclones and anticyclones all over the poles that wasn't really expected the blueish shoes is probably real and the biggest feature is that that Jupiter from the pole doesn't look anything like it does from the equator or from what our usual picture of jupiter has zones and belts the Great Red Spot and we see these stripes and that's the Jupiter we've all known and grown to love and when you look from the pole it looks totally different in fact a few if you look at this picture and somebody had shown it to you a few years ago I don't think anybody would've guessed this is Jupiter so the fact that there are these the number of cyclones that you see at the poles is really something we didn't expect and the fact that the north and south pole don't really look like each other is also a puzzle to us and so scientists are working to try to understand how these dynamics work and why Jupiter looks the way it is and of course we're also wondering whether this is a stable configuration we've only gone over a couple times and the questions these storms or cyclones that we see here are they stable are they going to stay the same way for years and years like the Great Red Spot which lasted 300 years at least or is this something that's dynamic and of course only time will tell tell us which one is true okay so the next slide slide three Scott Bolton three shows you a scientific and artistic expression of what the inside of Jupiter might look like and so these are cutouts of Jupiter from the top all the way down to the middle of the core and this represents what a lot of scientists believe Jupiter looked like even before Juno got there in fact a lot of our mission was based on some of these kinds of figures and what Juno is about is looking inside of Jupiter pretty much every way we know how so we have three different techniques to look into Jupiter one is the gravity field which sees all the way down to the bottom where you see ice rock core and you're looking at like 40 mega bars 40 million bars of pressure and one bar of pressure is what we feel it earth at sea level so that's the atmosphere of the earth at sea level pushing down on you so in the middle of Jupiter is a much much higher pressure so there is our ice Rock or the rock side the middle of Jupiter don't look like the rocks in your backyard we have a magnetic field experiment that looks into that bluish region that's called metallic hydrogen and that's where the hydrogen is squeezed so deep so so much and the temperature is such that it actually behaves more like a metal and it's like a liquid metallic hydrogen and we believe somewhere in there maybe the magnetic field gets created or maybe above that where there's enough charge particle but the magnetic field kind of penetrates into that so and then at the top part of the atmosphere just on the right you see a cutout called meteorological layer that's sort of the upper atmosphere where the clouds in the upper atmospheres dynamics it's actually quite deep it goes down hundreds or even a thousand kilometers deep we've never seen that and we have a new instrument that was pretty much invented for Juno called a microwave radiometer or MWR and it looks into that region so we have these three ways to look into Jupiter the top part is done with the microwave the middle part is done with the magnetic field and then the gravity looks all the way down to the center and so now what I'd like to do is show you a little bit of the new data and what we've learned from this MWR the first time we pass through so go to Scott Bolton slide four and so here you see on the left-hand side an image of Jupiter from Cassini I think it is and it and it shows you the Jupiter that we all are used to they're zones and belts are the stripes and then you see the Great Red Spot and on the right hand side you see some of the new microwave data and what you're looking at here is that the far right side up at the top of it is sort of the cloud tops and then the part that turns orange at the bottom of it is looking deep about 350 kilometers down now in between that what you see in the red the white and a little bit of bluish hue those are indications of how much ammonia is present or the abundance of ammonia so orange means it's very abundant yellow means a little bit less white is even less than that and blue is the least amount of the ammonia and so at the top is very little ammonia and the ammonia started but the most startling feature of this that was brand new and unexpected was this sort of column that you see an orange where you have a band of ammonia around the equator of Jupiter it's in the zone it's very deep and in fact this was completely unexpected you have a deep band of ammonia that goes from the top of Jupiter as deep as we can see I mean it goes down to 350 kilometers here because that's the limit of where we're looking it may Tenet rate even deeper than that so that was a new thing that we learned just when we first looked at this data and and saw it for the first time with MWR the other thing that is that's new about this is that the in general you see that the ammonia Peaks across all latitudes pretty deep all the way at the bottom and what scientists have expected was that that would peak and be uniform much further up near where we thought the ammonia clouds were going to be forming and then finally you see that there's a lot of variation with the ammonia in latitude there's some blueish parts in the midst northern latitudes there's different of yellows and oranges they're showing up even at the high latitudes and what this is telling us is that Jupiter is not very well mixed it's not only uniform in sight the idea once you drop below the sunlight that everything would all be uniform and boring and mixed up was completely wrong it's actually very different depending on where you look at and this is a brand-new result and this in fact addresses some questions that we've had for decades about twenty years ago we sent in the Galileo probe into Jupiter to measure its composition and to learn about its atmosphere at that time scientists thought that once you went through the cloud tops you would basically see you know the same thing and no matter where you looked it would look the same but in fact it came back with surprising results that people didn't completely understand and one of the assumptions was that the Galileo probe just happened to go into a warm spot and in fact it did look warm where it went in and maybe that was unique and what we're finding is is that many parts of Jupiter are unique and has if you would stuck in three or four probes into Jupiter in different places you very likely would have gotten three or four different results and you wouldn't have necessarily known what to make of it and so only through this new look that we see with MWR do we realize how variable this giant planet really is beneath its top layer of clouds and that's really going to force us to rethink not only how Jupiter works but how do we explore Saturn Uranus and Neptune if they're highly variable like this we may need some kind of technique like Juno or maybe the next generation of these kinds of things where we can look beneath the clouds globally to understand how things are varying you'll also note that the whole signature of the zones and belts doesn't seem that apparent in our data and that puzzled us and surprised us so the zone result structure either doesn't penetrate all the way down but you can see there is some structure it just doesn't correlate to the zones adults and so it evolves to something new inside of the planet other than maybe right near the equator where that ammonia band is and so that was a surprise to us and we've learned that these zones and belts you know either don't exist or this instrument isn't sensitive to it for some reason but we don't understand why it wouldn't be and so you really see this new picture of Jupiter in this data that it's very dynamic underneath the surface of the clouds as you penetrate down and there's this strange band at the equator now we have a it almost looks a little reminiscent to the earth the earth has something called a Hadley cell where we have a tropical band around the equator and then we have the subtropics just above that those are dry the tropical band is moist Jupiter looks a little bit like that in this ammonia but it it couldn't it probably is unlikely to that that for that to have worked the same way the earth does the earth the reason the earth has a tropical band is there's a surface underneath the atmosphere there allows for a return flow and so that experience you either have an ocean or land underneath and that allows for us to create the cycle and circulation cycles and create these dynamics at the earth Jupiter's gas all the way down so while it might look a little bit like the earth it can't be working the same way and so that was a big surprise that it is possible that this band penetrates all the way down into the middle of Jupiter I mean we don't know and eventually when we combine all of our magnetic field and gravity field science and get more microwave science we may be able to tell something about how this band is working and how it's being formed okay so I don't have another figure for this but I wanted to touch on the gravity field which I think there's there's sort of a general theme that we're seeing that the inside of Jupiter works very differently than people had assumed it's much more complex and there are motions deep inside that people hadn't anticipated and the gravity field is consistent with that when we went to go measure the gravity field what we were really looking for was the core whether there was a compact core or no core and instead what we found was that it really looks fuzzy there may be a core there but it's very big and it may be partially dissolved and we're studying that but that came as a big surprise to us that there was no core now this these mysteries that have to do with the interior extended to a magnetic field experiment and I want to turn it over to Jack and Ernie or my colleague who is the lead for the magnetometer experiment as well as the deputy PI to explain the magnetic field discoveries thank you Scott I like to shut off with the magnetic field observations first off the magnetometer is like a fancy compass electronic compass it measures both the direction of the magnetic field like a compass collars and it also measures the amplitude or the magnitude of the field now there's the Earth's magnetic field we have a pole and north and a pole in the south and in between it varies little wherever you go on earth the compass needle does not deviate very much of north or south and that was kind of our expectation for Jupiter before Juno's observations based on our knowledge from spacecraft the past not so close to Jupiter and Juno really is the first time we got in close very close to the surface of Jupiter and what we found in our first few passes is that the magnetic field was both stronger than we expected where we expected it to be strong and it was weaker than we expected when we expected it to be weak in other words it evidenced a dramatic spatial variation that that we were not quite aware of previously and to illustrate that I'd like to turn to jak1 which is a figure drawn up by a grad student up at Harvard Kimmy Moore and she's represented on this sphere the magnetic field that we expected at Jupiter and now those are the contours that extend from left to right the REDD+ contours up north and the blue- contours down south on top of that globe there's a trajectory the subsurface latitude and longitude of the spacecraft during pj1 in those five groups of different colors represent the kind of addition to the magnetic field that you would have to make to follow the field along the trajectory so it just illustrates the spatial variation of field that we see moving along the trajectory close to Jupiter and we've seen that now on subsequent periapsis and of course this is this is just a notional representation but it's very significant because when we see this kind of small spatial scale variation it indicates to us that we may be very close to the source and so that might mean that the Dynamo is above that metallic hydrogen region that you saw in scot-free and it may operate in the molecular hydrogen envelope above there so that's for a significant but I'd like to turn to some of the observations of the Aurora if you can go to Jack - we have a little movie showing the ultraviolet emissions from the South Pole collected by the UVs spectrometer as it flew above the pole this is the first complete image of the south poles that we have because of course all previous observations were made near the equator plane never from atop to Pater's polar region where we could stare down and look at the Aurora so this is an amazingly complex Aurora in the South Pole it has many components that we expected to see they're the very innermost circle you see is the main Aurora then there are very substantial emissions around that made Aurora extending all the way down to the emission that you see just to the left in this still which is jak3 now that's caused by an interaction with the satellite IO the interval satellite in Jupiter's magnetosphere that long tail extending past IO that simply traces out io s orbital motion about Jupiter there very significant thing about this figure are the reds and the whites and greens those colors represent a different path length through the atmosphere for these photons is ultraviolet photons and in inside the main Aurora we see emissions that are largely red that line between the red emission and white emission that follows the Sun around and illustrates a solar wind control that of the Aurora that we were not quite prepared to expect but more significantly it looks like we can interpret those reds and whites in an entirely different way we have previously it looks like the ready mission might evidence electrons being sucked out of the atmosphere instead of precipitating in we normally attribute rural emissions to electrons precipitating down onto the ionosphere but instead it looks like some of these emissions are actually driven by electrons being pulled out of the atmosphere so that intriguing I have to move now to my final graphic which is Jack floor I want to talk just briefly about the trip from Earth to Jupiter we spent five the long cold years in space in transit to Jupiter during that time the star cameras that we use to provide attitude information for the magnetometers they looked out into space continuously and occasionally they saw things flying by that weren't in the star catalog and what we found is that we could track some of those objects and indeed they were excavated from the solar panel by the impact of dust particles now these are tiny particles you could fit a hundred of them on the end of a pen but they're traveling at enormous velocity they're 10 times the speeding bullet and so they excavate little pieces from the spacecraft and those float off and we see them in reflected sunlight so it turns out that we can use this spacecraft and it's prodigious 60 square meters of solar array as the largest dust detector ever flown in space and so we're sensitive to particles that are larger and more infrequent than those that can be measured in space by a dedicated dust detector so that's exciting not to worry the spacecraft is operating fine it turns out all spacecraft traveling this path are pelted with numerous impacts we recorded close to a thousand of them on the way out and we're still operating fine we're just the first base craft that's able to see what happens so I'd like to turn this over now to my colleague Heidi Becker talk about the radiation environment lighting thank you jack and to start I'd actually like to keep on the theme of star cameras and share a very special picture with everybody that we took with our stellar reference unit which is the spacecraft star camera this is our navigation camera that takes pictures of the Stars to guide our way so if everyone would go ahead and start id-1 which is our animation what you see is where we took this image and it was in a very special place what you're seeing is Juno flying in between the narrow gap between the planet and the radiation pulse and as we turned out the star cameras took this picture and if you go to Heidi to you'll see the still of that and what you're looking at is the view of the constellation Orion from inside Jupiter's rings and this is the first image of Jupiter's ring that has ever been collected from the inside of it looking out Juno is 3,000 miles from the planet when we took this picture and what you're seeing here is the main belt of Orion in the center or in the main belt of Jupiter actually main ring in the center of the image and the bright star in the upper left is battle juice and the three bright one in the lower right hand side of the image is Orion's belt so what you're looking at here is a ring of dust that's 40,000 miles away and stars that are hundreds of light-years away all in the same picture and if you go to hide a tree we've connected the dots for you so you can see Orion there it's very recognizable this is what it looks like when you see it from Earth and we thought it would be nice to share with everybody that you could be half a billion miles away from where we started or some look at this stargazing from Juno and heaven looks the same to us from Jupiter so and there's no radiation in that picture but that isn't true everywhere at peridot so if you will go to Heidi for and play this animation you can just keep playing this as I explain it to you this is an artist rendition of Juno's para Jove one which is our first path close to the planet and see we're just grazing the inner edges of the radiation belts we go through that gap now we know for sure that gap is there we were counting on it but no spacecraft has ever found that close through the planet no one has ever been that high in the inner edge of the radiation belt and like everything else with Juno the radiation environment was different than we thought it would be and the closer we got to Jupiter the more different it was than we thought it would be and as a matter of fact when you hit those inner edges there that you see in the animation high-energy electrons that get into our instruments and degrade and create noise the number of those was 10 times less than what we thought it was going to be which is very great news from an engineering perspective it's great for science all the radiation belt modelers are kind of a lot of data to work with and this is something we never could have known without going now now this is just one piece of our orbit and we know we're going to get in the harsh of places later on but I also want to let everybody know that Juno is very healthy and doing great and the suit of armor is working so with that I'd like to hand it over to candy he'll tell you about you know Pam Thank You Heidi I'm going to be showing some data that we collected just last Friday so just last Friday Juno passed close to Jupiter on what we call para Jove 6 and what you are looking at look at candy Hanson one those are 14 Juno cam images that we collected as we flew through that to our paths from the North Pole to the South Pole so the image on on the left is looking straight down at the North Pole it's half lit as Scott was describing the North Pole itself is approximately in the center and you're seeing all of Jupiter on the far right on the right-hand side we're looking at the southern hemisphere and again we're far enough away from the planet that you see all of Jupiter in our field of view now the interesting thing is what happens as we zoom in and these 14 images the width of the image is the width of the Juno cam field of view but we collect our images as the spacecraft spins so as the spacecraft gets closer and closer and closer to Jupiter we see less and less of Jupiter itself in terms of area but we see more and more detail in the pictures and so I am going to actually show you the fourth image in the sequence from the right at the left to start with and then the fourth from the right so just picking out two of those 14 to look at in this higher detail so if you go to candy - this is taken at a proximately 38 degrees north latitude and you can see a big wavy band of clouds in the middle of it the image if you go to candy 3 I'm drawing your attention to those clouds and then in candy 4 it's really just a cutout of that same that same image but there's a couple of things I wanted to point out here so we've got these big wavy clouds again you can see tiny little white dots they look tiny just because Jupiter is so big these are actually clouds that are about 50 kilometers across they are up above the cloud deck we know that because we can actually see them casting little tiny shadows and we've seen this actually before in some of our earlier images but in this particular pair of joke the lighting is really good to see these features and we have our camera settings dialed in and and honestly we were so enchanted by the polls that we're only now just starting to look at other places on the planet so so these look almost like squall lines if you go to candy 5 this is an image taken now in the southern hemisphere this is the South tropical zone and again I am going to go to the cutouts that show you in more detail what we're looking at so candy 6 and then stop at candy 7 here you can see again that it's a really stormy day on Jupiter we've got these little white storm systems really just scattered across the entire South tropical zone again they're about 50 kilometers across which is so I keep saying tiny but they're really not tiny at all and they're up above the cloud deck at a pressure level where the temperature is going to be very cold and so what you're seeing is most likely ice crystals of water ice and ammonia ice I want to mention that these images that I just showed are were processed by two of our amateur citizen scientists Gerald ISTEP and Shaun Doran they have processed quite a number of our images but it's really the whole endeavor of stupid of Juno cam was to find ways for the public to participate in a meaningful way on a flight mission so with that I'd like to draw your attention to candy number eight and what you'll see is you'll see across the top I've got four images of Jupiter this is just four of many images that our amateur astronomer community has contributed so on our website we have a way that these the community can upload pictures taken from their backyard telescopes that's the top row then we take those images and again many more than four and we make a cylindrical map which is what you see along the bottom then for a given peridot past and in this case it's number six we ask the public to define points of interest things places they think would be good spots for pictures and so that's what the yellow circles represent and the two images that I just showed you are the ones that are covered by those green circles so we voted on the public voted on what to take pictures of we ended up with those and so our whole citizen science endeavor I think is is is turning out to be quite interesting the last chart kandi Hansen nine we love to see artistic products in addition to the more rigorous renditions of color reconstruction and so on and the thing about art is that it captures feelings that either you don't recognize in yourself or maybe you don't know how to express and for me this image captures how I feel to be a part of this project and I'll just mention this was processed by Myrna with that I'm going to turn it back to Scott to give us a little bit more so thanks kandi I'm always amazed at looking at those pictures the idea of seeing those little cloud features of white caps coming out of Jupiter I mean they're full of ammonia and water ice and you know what you're really watching it it's snowing on Jupiter and we're seeing how it works and so I can imagine myself flying around in that atmosphere while it's snowing and and it's really great to be able to project myself and use that imagination and understand how another whole world works some things are similar and a lot of things are different and you know your last picture of the art really shows you know how people are able to artistically express themselves and it's so great that they that we can do that and enable that with the Juno we have a big campaign with Gino for public awareness where we're trying to inspire and motivate the really the connections between science art and music and a lot of the images that are being made on our website by the public are actually artistic some of them are science a lot of them artistic and it's great to see that and that whole collaboration that we do extended the music and we formed a collaboration with Apple and we've made some music that's you know related and Apple helped us distribute that and what I'd like to play for you next is some sounds that we got that we received on PJ for the fourth time we flew by Jupiter and we've been studying those and we want to share them with you because they really echo and enter and demonstrate this connection between science music art in the sense that these sounds sound a lot like musical notes so you can take a listen to nature's music here with going to Scott Bolton slide 7 now that's a audio vist video file mmm Oh Oh well I'd like to go to Scott Bolton eight sort of to close this is a picture of Jupiter that's also posted on our website we open it up to amateur astronomers who help us actually plan out the Juno cam images and this was taken by Christopher go and posted it's a pretty recent picture of Jupiter and what I wanted to show this looks like a Jupiter that we know and love so it's got the zones of belts in a great red spot and I want to extend an invitation to all of you to join our turnin team as we look forward to our very next close polar pass by Jupiter when we'll be targeting that great red spot now that great spots moving around so it's not the easiest thing to target but on July 11 we're targeting to fly right over that so stay tuned and you can join us on July 11th thank you all right thank you Scott and thank you to all the panelists I do we're going to be ready to take some questions from reporters and we'll try to grab a couple's in social media a reminder to reporters if you do have a question please press star-1 tell the operator your name and your affiliation and I do want to mention that this media telecon will be archived afterwards with visuals on Ustream @ww Ustream TV slash nasa/jpl - and I'll give that out once again before we wrap up let's go to our first question which comes from alan boyle of geek wire Allen hi thank you I guess this would be a question for Scott what do you think are the factors that that have led to these surprises how how did you get things so wrong I guess would be one way of putting it so I think we're all sort of feeling the humility and humbleness of nature you know I think a lot of scientists when we looked out at the giant planets and we saw that they were you know so big these giant penguin gas balls was that a lot of Earth were through the sunlight generating dynamics in the atmosphere and and a lot of assumptions where there once you turn off that energy that maybe everything would be uniform and boring and I think that we were just wrong and so this is making us rethink how giant planets work not just in our own system but giant planets are really important throughout the galaxies in the universe I mean we see other planetary systems and a lot of them have giant planets sometimes many times bigger than the Jupiter even and we're getting the first really close up and personal look of Jupiter and we're seeing that a lot of our ideas were incorrect and maybe naive that that is very complex and it's really there's a lot of deep motions going on and there's a theme here there's emotions going on just beneath the clouds that we see with the microwave and there may be very deep winds and deep motions going on that we see with the gravity field all you know and it's hard to say yet but more data will tell us how deep those really go you know we're just at the beginning of this mission where we're eventually we're going to map out that planet all right thank you Scott and then we're going to take our next question and actually before I do I just wanted to ask reporters because we do have quite a few of you in the queue to keep your question to one question if needed one quick follow-up so we can go through the first round and then afterwards assuming we have time we can go back to everybody anyway but that was fine and Alan Goyal you did not do that so you did not do more than one question so it wasn't intended at you all right let's go ahead with a question for Marsha Donna Associated Press yes hi for dr. Bolton's the the larger splotches at the poles not the oval cyclones but those other weather systems there are thousands of kilometres across what are those and for the Cyclones do you have any idea how powerful they would be you know what moreover category-five and how many cyclones all together would you guess so I haven't done a count of all those cyclones but if there's lots of them I mean you could count them yourself there's dozens at least going through the system these large pieces are other dynamic features you know I don't think I can explain exactly how fast many of these are going we haven't measured all the velocities for each of these cyclones of course it takes multiple images and at different times in order to get that kind of dynamic information and so I think those are objectives that maybe we'll be able to accomplish as we go over the poles of multiple times and overpair job six the one we just took we designed it you know once we saw those cyclones we basically set out to take images so that we could try to measure some of those velocities that you're talking about but I think you know a lot of this was so new we really just learned that Jupiter really is like this from this data and now the hard work comes with the theories to try to explain why and how is this kind of the dynamics manifested in honor they maintained and are they stable and these are questions that I think are new objectives for our mission as we move on and get more data Oh quick follow up these these dynamic features that are so much bigger than the Cyclones could they also be cyclones like mega sized cyclones they could be although they don't appear to be gigantic cyclones they don't have the same morphology that I would be used to but I think that those kinds of questions I think we would be better off pointing you toward our our atmosphere experts rather than me okay thank you all right thanks Marcia and then we're going to move on to bill Harwood of CBS News hi Bill hey thanks can you expand a little bit more about core I'm not really here what I'm how to visualize a fuzzy core what I realize don't have a solid answer to this but you know any expansion would be great candy on candy Hanson 5 the width of that headband that whitish band with other stuff it looks so much broader than the normal belt we see from equatorial diffuse I'm just wondering if it's the orientation that's throwing me off I'm not really sure what I'm seeing there Thanks why are we like Andy go first okay yeah so when when we're close to Jupiter we do not see horizon to horizon so we're only seeing you know a limited range in latitude and that's why it looks so odd and if you look at the the 14 the sequence of 14 you can see you can literally the way to think about it is if you were looking through Juno cams camera lens riding on the spacecraft you start out at a distance say you were looking at your hand at a distance now you pull your hand into your nose you know that's what it's like and so we are only seeing just the south tropical zone at that point because we are so close to Jupiter okay thank you and we're going to go now to my koala face wait I think I have a question on the core okay sorry about that so you know the fuzzy core idea so scientists where they've done modeled and what we were kind of expecting to see at Jupiter there were two extreme cases a little compact core down in the in the center of Jupiter maybe earth size or one earth masses tender masses something like that all compact and and tight in the center of Jupiter or maybe there was milk or maybe Jupiter formed without a core at all and those are the two kind of extreme models and most scientists were in one camp or the other and what we found was really neither or true there may be a little bit of a compact core but most of things there may be layers there and there's there seems to be a fuzzy core that may be much larger than anybody had anticipated and so the gravity data that we've gotten thus far is not really consistent with just a small at core or zero core but it is somewhat consistent with a large fuzzy core that may be partially dissolve and it's also consistent maybe with some deep motions their zonal winds and things like that that may be going on that are dictating the interior of Jupiter's dynamics which maybe are very different than what you know historical models have assumed all right thanks we're going to go to Mike wall at space.com thank you guys yeah this was all yeah that's just like really really interesting on this this one's probably first Scott and for also for a candy maybe I'm Scott like you said that those clouds it was it was snowing on Jupiter um I mean I liked about water ice that we're talking about it means to know that that like we're used to here on earth or is it some kind of exotic substance I mean is it something we would recognize it's probably mostly ammonia ice but there may be water ice mixed into it so it's not exactly like the snow that we have and you know I was using my imagination when I said it's snowing there it could be hail great thank you okay we're going to jump over to Ken Chang with the New York Times ken I was wondering if this is for Jack if you could explain the physics of how electrons could be sucked out of the atmosphere to create the aurora okay in that picture we had always assumed that if the ultraviolet emissions are coming from deeper in the atmosphere which is what that color represents that it was simply due to particles that were so energetic they were penetrating deeper than the rest of them and we really never have should have perhaps but never consider the idea is that well maybe they're just being accelerated out of the ionosphere and indeed when we cross to the polar cap of the electron detector Jedi measured electrons moving up away from Jupiter across that entire inner circle and so putting the two together we now recognize that that what we see in red it probably shows us that electrons are being pulled out of the atmosphere by an electrostatic potential electric potential is let's do that we put a voltage on the field line and an electric field and draw the electrons out of the ionosphere and as you're leaving they excite they collide with the hydrogen molecules and exciting ultraviolet emissions so it's a it's a 180 degree turn about from the way we were thinking about those emissions prior to the general observations okay we're going to switch over to one second to social media we have a question from Jorge Vidal on Facebook asking if you've seen this like the Cyclones observed near Jupiter's North Pole change when you compare pictures of different flybys yeah the quick and simple answer is yes and in fact we were just puzzling yesterday over trying to see if is this one the same as that one or that one the same is this one so yeah they do they do change all right thanks to candy for that reply and we're going to take one more right now from Twitter Torrey is asking if Jupiter's magnetic poles are really far from their axis of rotation yeah yeah this is Jack of the magnetic poles whether Jupiter's magnetic field are really quite similar to the Earth's there the poles are offset by about 10 degrees but what's different courses the small spatial scale features that we're seeing now they have to account for the differences and what we're measuring and to use that earth analogy again if we were to follow along the surface of Jupiter along that track with a compass we would see it Evi eight left and right much more so than we when we see moving around on the earth the more complex love your magnetic field but overall the broad scale as you step away from Jupiter we would call it a dipole field that's really quite similar to the Earth's dipole field only much much stronger thank you jack we're going to take a question now from Space Flight Insider and ocean McIntyre so I'm just wondering on spot volton three you have this large amount of nopales hydrogen is there an estimate at this point of the percentage of the planet that is made of metallic hydrogen versus molecular hydrogen this is Jack again of the current models place the molecular hydrogen transition to metallic hydrogen down at about 0.75 point eight planet radius and this is where the pressure about two million times the atmospheric pressure on earth is so great that it squeezes the electrons off the nuclei and they're free to move about much as they are in the middle but that's at about 0.75 or point a to the planet radius and it depends on our knowledge of the behavior of hydrogen under such extreme pressure and temperature this is a this is about the pressure that we can achieve on earth in a laboratory with a diamond anvil so it's a area of intense research right now and they're just getting to to mega bars where we can see stable metallic iron thank you our next question is from Kelly baby at sky and telescope yeah thanks very much Scott I hope at some point you tell us which of those plasma waves are from the monoliths not this is actually for Heidi Becker and I'm wondering you said that there's a gap at the inner edge of the radiation belt that you expected you expect that there is a gap there why doesn't the radiation belt go all the way to the planet well it keeps the electrons trapped in the magnetic field is a kind of a special cocktail of their direction relative to the magnetic field and their energy relative to the magnetic field strength so it kind of has to be just perfect to stay trapped and if it's not those electrons will just keep on going and go into the planet and be lost and as you heard Jack talk about there all of these kind of strange non-uniformities of a magnetic field so we expect there to be some region where electrons have gone into the planet and been lost and then it will be empty so we did expect based on that theory that there would be a gap but we were just crossing our fingers that there would be for Juno and there is so if I could just follow up are you saying that very close to the planet the notion of a dipole field breaks down and it becomes a higher-order field that allows the electrons to be lost yes in some sense I mean we have an offset tilted dipole at Jupiter this is Scott to some extent and so you know as these electrons move around the planet they're there they're trapped in the magnetic field but the magnetic field is not perfectly aligned with Jupiter's spin axes and it's offset a little from the middle so as I go to one side of the planet they get a little bit closer to the atmosphere than on the other side because they stay they move around in constant magnetic field strength so on one side they're going to smash into the atmosphere before they smash into it on the other side so they're going to create a little bit of a gap oh I got it the other thing that creates the gap is that they're radiating their out their energy away very very quickly due to synchrotron emission the high energy radio emission that comes out from relativistic motions of these high-energy electrons and so as they get close to the planet and the magnetic field goes up they start radiating away so those two processes kind of compete against each other to create the gap and and we knew there was a little a gap there because the Galileo probe showed evidence of a gap as it went in but it only sampled one spot and there's a gap like that at the Earth's radiation belts as well all right thank you next question is going to come from Mental Floss with David Brown hi this question is for Scott having collected so much data that challenges fundamental assumptions about Jupiter how did that affect future passes by Juno well they make them more exciting but I mean the truth is is that we just started to scratch the surface we have a you know one of the great things about exploration is that you go to a place that you've never been before and you invent new instruments and new kinds of ways to make measurements and you discover things that you never could have anticipated I mean that's the whole point of exploring and learning and so we went and of course we're up close and personal to Jupiter for the first time and we have some very unique instruments and some that have been invented basically for this mission and we saw brand new kinds of things now the plan always was to go over and map the planet so we want to go over many different longitudes and and eventually learn how the planet looks all the way around and that's really what tells us about how it works inside completely and so what we've seen is we're surprised and in fact all the data really points to the fact that we need more the rest of our mission in order to really figure out how Jupiter works the good news is that we also have confirmed that Juno is the right tool to do this we have the right set of instruments we have the right orbit we actually are going to you know win over this beast and we're going to learn how it works but it's going to take time as and we have to be patient in order to unravel the mysteries because many of them are wrapped into how does Jupiter look at different longitudes or and time periods and and so we have the right tool to do the job and so it doesn't we're not going to change our observing strategy necessarily in order to accomplish the answers to these questions but we we are changing the models and more data of course goes in to constrain it and so that's how science works we will modify some of the imaging in order to try to measure the cyclone speeds and things like that all right we're at we're at the top of the hour we can go a few minutes a pass to wrap up a couple of questions that have been waiting here is sort of a last call for reporters on the line if you do have a question please press star one and we'll get you in the queue for a couple of final questions in the meantime let's jump in for a follow-up from Ken Chang New York Times oh thank you I was wondering if you managed to doing comparisons between the geo data and what Cassini is getting at Saturn we absolutely plan to do that in fact I'm glad you brought that up it's a great question so I'm on the Cassini team many of us on Juno or are on that team as well and that many many years ago when we first started to develop Juno I went to the team and said why don't we try to take Cassini at the end and go into the Juno like orbit and we could you know learn about both planets in a similar fashion now Cassini doesn't have the exact same kind of instruments we have and of course we're tuned to do this interior research but it has a lot of great instruments that can learn a lot about the interior and other things that it can do close up and so after a while the Cassini team thought and NASA all got behind that and first Cassini's in that mode now it's exciting because we have two spacecraft orbiting two of the giant planets in the system and we're both doing these closed colored like flybys and so there are plans of course where we're both trying to figure out our data from our own planet at the moment but eventually we will prepare and of course that's the key to scientific advancement is comparative study so being able to compare Cassini's measurements at Saturn and Jupiter zhmed as measurements by Juno we will really be able to advance our understanding of how these giant planets work all right we're going to take a question now from Almanac on of the Los Angeles Times hi I just had a quick question you mentioned that the radiation levels were about 10 times lower than expected which is good news does this have any implications for the orbit let you go back to some of these shorter orbits if it seems like it's less damaging out there well this is highly high the place that I was referring to is this really brief sort of two 15-minute blips that we have very close to the planet our orbit is a lot bigger and it's great that the levels were appearing to be 10 times less close to the plant that's not all of the orbit so there's a lot more data from further out and the really nasty parts that we're going to get into later is near the equator further out from where I was talking about so it's a little early to speculate on on levels what we're seeing now is very good spacecraft is behaving very well but we can we can really only say right now that what we're seeing close to the planet is certainly much less than what we thought would get in thank you all right thanks so we're going to take one final question from social media and then we'll wrap up with one or two media questions and again to remind you that the audio audio with visuals of this telecon will be archived on wwu stream TV slash NASA JPL - that's the number - okay and then also any reporters who have not had a chance to ask a question when we wrap up you can call us here at the JPL newsroom which is eight one eight three five four five zero 1 1 or at NASA headquarters News room as well I'll get you that number when we wrap up all right so in the meantime we are going to take a question from Twitter and the question is from Leonardo who asks why our Jupiter's storms so big well Jupiter itself is really big so I think the scaling if you compare the size of storms on earth to the size of the earth the size of storms on Jupiter to the size of Jupiter I don't think it's really really unexpected I think that the scaling sort of works in a very very rough way okay we're going to go back for a quick question from again from sky and telescope Kelly Beattie very much so this is for candy Hanson candy I've been following a lot of the amateur processing of the images and the interaction with the team it can you characterize how valuable the role of amateur astronomers has been in in creating targets and actually enhancing the science is this is this the the most intensive interaction that you've had on a mission yes yes it definitely is we have a very tiny tiny ops team and the the contributions of the amateurs are essential I cannot understate how important the contributions are we don't have a way to plan our data without the contributions of the amateur astronomers we don't have a big image processing team so we are completely relying on the help of our citizen scientists and in fact the data interpretation as well we have people jumping in to help us with that as well so if you go to the image process section of the mission Juno website you will see that we have over 900 contributions of images that have been processed by members of the public and the thing and what I find really actually the most phenomenal of all is that this is takes real work when you download a Juno cam image and process it it's not something you do in five minutes the pictures that we get that people upload back on to our site they've invested hours and hours of their own time and then generously return that to us so it's really been remarkable thank you alright and our last question comes again from ocean McIntyre at spaceflight insider regarding the thermal information I know the microwave radiometer has been tracking some of that information getting that data has it been anything regarding the different thermal informations and thermal data for different layers and with interpretive not sure I understand that question you mean in addition to the microwave instrument well I know that the microwave instrument is is also looking at the thermal thermal emissions it has there been any data that's come back or that's different than what you expected to see yeah well I mean where the microwave emission works is that it's microwave wave right radiometer works is we're looking at thermal emission coming out of Jupiter and so the data that I presented on slide 4 is really the microwave emission we're interpreting it and showing it to you in terms of ammonia abundance but we're really looking at brightness temperatures which are related to the temperatures inside of Jupiter's atmosphere and so that's exactly what we're looking at it's showing you the variability on and then we have another instrument that was built in Italy called G RAM that also looks a thermal but it looks at the top part of the clouds it doesn't penetrate down like the microwave does and we have maps and we publish data associated with the thermal emission from that as well thank you very much all right thank you that wraps up our Q&A and actually wraps up this whole event I want to thank our panelists today for some super interesting stuff and thanks to all our media and social media followers who add some excellent questions and again a reminder that you can re-watch this it should be posted shortly on WWE stream TV slash nasa/jpl - any follow-up questions from news media again to JPL newsroom eight one eight three five four five zero one one or Laurie can t o-- at nasa headquarters at 202 three five eight one zero seven seven that's two zero two three five eight one zero seven seven and of course there's lots of info about juno online at WWF a govt / juno and also at mission juno dot f w RI dot edu and we do have the press release that just went out or a while ago and that is now posted on the telecon page thanks everybody for joining us and have a great day

Channel: DEEP SPACE TV

Views: 28,765

Rating: 4.5999999 out of 5

Keywords: juno, nasa, science, jupiter, mission, first, 2017, space, teleconference, jet propulsion laboratory, jpl, discovery, juno mission, planet, nasa’s juno spacecraft, junocam, nasa juno, nasa juno mission, nasa juno jupiter, nasa juno mission update, nasa juno spacecraft, juno jupiter video, juno jupiter flyby, juno jupiter pictures, juno jupiter footage, juno jupiter mission, juno jupiter, data

Id: VxheA98TXT4

Length: 68min 49sec (4129 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2017