NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers their most detailed view yet of a second red spot emerging on Jupiter. For the first time in history, astronomers have witnessed the birth of a new red spot on the giant planet, which is located half a billion miles away. The storm is roughly one-half the diameter of its bigger and legendary cousin, the Great Red Spot. Researchers suggest that the new spot may be related to a possible major climate change in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Dubbed by some astronomers as "Red Spot Jr.," the new spot has been followed by amateur and professional astronomers for the past few months. But Hubble's new images provide a level of detail comparable to that achieved by NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as they flew by Jupiter a quarter-century ago.

Before it mysteriously changed to the same color as the Great Red Spot, the smaller spot was known as the White Oval BA. It formed after three white oval-shaped storms merged during 1998 to 2000. At least one or two of the progenitor white ovals can be traced back to 90 years ago, but they may have been present earlier. A third spot appeared in 1939. (The Great Red Spot has been visible for the past 400 years, ever since earthbound observers had telescopes to see it).

When viewed at near-infrared wavelengths (specifically 892 nanometers — a methane gas absorption band) Red Spot Jr. is about as prominent in Jupiter's cloudy atmosphere as the Great Red Spot. This may mean that the storm rises miles above the top of the main cloud deck on Jupiter just as its larger cousin is thought to do. Some astronomers think the red hue could be produced as the spots dredge up material from deeper in Jupiter's atmosphere, which is then chemically altered by the Sun's ultraviolet light.

Researchers think the Hubble images may provide evidence that Jupiter is in the midst of a global climate change that will alter its average temperature at some latitudes by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The transfer of heat from the equator to the planet's south pole is predicted to nearly shut off at 34 degrees southern latitude, the latitude where the second red spot is forming. The effects of the shut-off were predicted by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) to become apparent approximately seven years after the White Oval collisions in 1998 to 2000.

Two teams of astronomers were given discretionary time on Hubble to observe the new red spot.

{Left} — This image, acquired April 8, 2006 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (high-resolution channel), shows that the second red spot has a small amount of pale clouds in the center. A strong convective event, which is likely a thunderstorm, is visible as a bright white cloud north of the oval, in the turbulent clouds that precede the Great Red Spot. As the oval continues its eastward drift and the Great Red Spot moves westward, they should pass each other in early July. This contrast-enhanced image was taken in blue and red light. The group that performed this observation was led by Amy Simon-Miller (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Glenn Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Nancy Chanover (New Mexico State University).

{Right} — Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (wide field channel) took this image of the entire disk of Jupiter on April 16. The second red spot appears at southern latitudes, below the center of Jupiter's disk. The new spot is approximately the size of Earth's diameter. The image was taken in visible light and at near-infrared wavelengths, and does not represent Jupiter's true colors. The red color traces high-altitude haze blankets: the equatorial zone, the Great Red Spot, the second red spot, and the polar hoods. The Hubble group that conducted this observation is led jointly by Imke de Pater (UCB Astronomy) and Philip Marcus (UCB Mechanical Engineering). Other team members are Michael Wong (UCB Astronomy), Xylar Asay-Davis (UCB Mechanical Engineering), and Christopher Go, an amateur astronomer with the Astronomical League of the Philippines.

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon-Miller (NASA/GSFC), and I. de Pater (University of California Berkeley)

Image Type: Astronomical
STScI-PRC2006-19

Source: Hubble - News Centre

Totally Cool Waspie

"astronomers have witnessed the birth of a new red spot on the giant planet, which is located half a billion miles away, " from the giant red spot?

Woah!!

The gravity on Jupiter is intense! Since these dots (anticyclonic hypercane) are so huge.. there could maybe be more, just smaller?

Jupiter the bringer of Jollity! ... that it does.

Personally i adore Saturn, the bringer of old age and wisdom!

No, from us. Jupiter is big, but it's not that big.

Oh, i see i must have read it wrong.




Pretty big in comparison tho

June 5, 2006: The two biggest storms in the solar system are about to go bump in the night, in plain view of backyard telescopes.

Storm #1 is the Great Red Spot, twice as wide as Earth itself, with winds blowing 350 mph. The behemoth has been spinning around Jupiter for hundreds of years.

Storm #2 is Oval BA, also known as "Red Jr.," a youngster of a storm only six years old. Compared to the Great Red Spot, Red Jr. is half-sized, able to swallow Earth merely once, but it blows just as hard as its older cousin.


Above: Jupiter's two red spots, photographed on May 28, 2006, by amateur astronomer Christopher Go of
the Philippines. [Larger image]

The two are converging. Closest approach: the 4th of July, according to Amy Simon-Miller of the Goddard Space Flight Center who has been monitoring the storms using the Hubble Space Telescope.

"There won't be a head-on collision," she says. "The Great Red Spot is not going to 'eat' Oval BA or anything like that." But the storms' outer bands will pass quite close to one another—and no one knows exactly what will happen.

Amateur astronomers are already monitoring the event. Christopher Go of the Philippines took the picture above using his 11-inch telescope on May 28th. "The distance between the storms is shrinking visibly every night," he says.

Similar encounters have happened before, notes JPL's Glenn Or ton, a colleague of Simon-Miller. "Oval BA and the Great Red Spot pass each other approximately every two years." Previous encounters in 2002 and 2004 were anti-climatic. Aside from some "roughing" around the edges, both storms survived apparently unaltered.

This time might be different. Simon-Miller and Orton think Red Jr. could lose its red color, ironically, by passing too close to the Great Red Spot.

Red Jr./Oval BA wasn't always red. For five years, 2000 to 2005, the storm was pure white like many other small "white ovals" circling the planet. In 2006 astronomers noticed a change: a red vortex formed inside the storm, the same color as the powerful Great Red Spot. This was a sign, researchers believed, that Oval BA was intensifying.


Above: Red Oval BA photographed by astronomers
using the Hubble Space Telescope in April 2006. [More]

The color of the Great Red Spot itself is a mystery. A popular theory holds that the storm dredges up material from deep inside Jupiter's atmosphere, lifting it above the highest clouds where solar ultraviolet rays turn "chromophores" (color-changing compounds) red. Oval BA turned red when it became strong enough to perform the same trick.

Bumping up against the Great Red Spot, however, could weaken Oval BA, turning it white again. Simon-Miller explains: "We believe the Great Red Spot will push Oval BA toward a southern jet stream, which is blowing against the oval's counterclockwise rotation." This would slow Oval BA's spin, possibly reversing the process that reddened it in the first place.

What will actually happen? "We'll see," she says. That's what telescopes are for.

Note to sky watchers: Jupiter is easy to find. It pops out of the evening twilight before any other star, surprisingly bright. Look for it halfway up the southeastern sky at sunset: sky map.

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Production Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

Source: Science@NASA

If Jupiter is experiencing a global climate change, what other global things could result from that?

More superstorms like the Red Spot.

The Gemini Observatory press release is reproduced below:


Gemini Observatory ALTAIR Adaptive Optics Image

Gemini North adaptive optics image of Jupiter and its two red spots (which apppear white because this is a
near-infrared image; in visible light they appear reddish). In this color composite image, white indicates cloud
features at relatively high altitudes; blue indicates lower cloud structures; and red represents still deeper cloud
features. The two red spots appear more white than red, because their tops hover high above the surrounding
clouds. Also prominent is the polar stratospheric haze, which makes Jupiter bright near the pole (unlike the
other orange/red features in this image, the polar haze is high in Jupiter's atmosphere). Other tiny white spots
are regions of high clouds, like towering thunderheads. In visible light Jupiter looks orangish, but in the
near-infrared the blue color is due to strong absorption features. The blue mid-level clouds are also closest to what
one would see in a visual light image.

See technical details below for information on processing and techniques used to produce this image.
Full-Resolution TIFF | 2.0mb
Full-Resolution JPEG | 164kb



FridayThursday, 20 July 2006
A high-resolution image released today by the Gemini Observatory shows Jupiter's two giant red spots brushing past one another in the planet's southern hemisphere.

The image was obtained in near-infrared light using adaptive optics which corrects, in real-time, for most of the distortions caused by turbulence in Earth's atmosphere. The result is a view from the ground that rivals images from space.

In the near-infrared, the red spots appear white rather than the reddish hue seen at visible wavelengths.


"It was tricky getting this image," said Gemini astronomer Chad Trujillo who helped lead the effort to capture the event. "Since we used adaptive optics we needed a star-like object nearby to guide on, so we had to find a time when Jupiter's moon Io would appear close enough to Jupiter and the red spots would be optimally placed on Jupiter's disk. Fortunately it all worked out on the evening of July 13th and we were able to capture this relatively rare set of circumstances," said Trujillo.

Both red spots are massive storm systems. The top of the larger one, known for a long time as the Great Red Spot, lies about 8 kilometers (5 miles) above the neighboring cloud tops and is the largest hurricane known in the solar system. The smaller storm (officially called Oval BA, but informally known as Red Spot Junior) is another hurricane-like system. Since it appears nearly as bright as the Great Red Spot in near-infrared images, Red Spot Junior may be at a similar height in the Jovian atmosphere as the Great Red Spot.

Red Spot Junior is roughly half the size of its famous cousin, but its winds blow just as strong. This mighty new storm formed between 1998 and 2000 from the merger of three long-enduring white ovals, each a similar storm system at a smaller scale, which had been observed for at least 60 years. But it was not until February 27th of this year that Philippine amateur astronomer Christopher Go discovered that the color of the newly formed white oval had turned brick red. Astronomers were witnessing the birth of a new red spot.

No one is certain why this white oval turned red. However, University of Hawaii astronomer Toby Owen supports a hypothesis developed by New Mexico State University astronomer Rita Beebe, who suggests that the merger of the three white ovals led to an intensified storm system. This made it strong enough to dredge up reddish material from deeper in the atmosphere. As this material welled up in the middle of the spot, it is contained (or protected) from escape by the strong circulating currents at the spot's edges. "What's frustrating is that we don't know what this reddish material is," Owen said. "But it appears that the ability to dredge it up depends on the size of these oval storm systems."

Another popular hypothesis contends that the material dredged up from below Jupiter's visible clouds climbs to an altitude where the Sun's ultraviolet light chemically alters it to give it a reddish hue.

Nothing dramatic is expected to happen as the two storm systems continue their close encounter. The white ovals from which Red Spot Junior is made have passed by the Great Red Spot countless times as the atmospheric current in which they are embedded moves at a different speed from the one at the latitude of the Great Red Spot. Nevertheless, we should keep open the possibility that the Great Red Spot could now, or in the future, push Red Spot Junior into a southern jet stream that is blowing against the storm's counterclockwise rotation. If Red Spot Junior's spin slows, its color may revert back to white, but that remains to be seen. Right now, as the Gemini image shows, Red Spot Junior is demonstrating its staying power.

Each red spot is rotating with Jupiter at slightly different rates and over time, like passing cars on a highway, the two spots change relative positions causing periodic close passages like this. However, this is the first such passage since the new, smaller red spot intensified and turned red. A recent optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope was obtained in April of this year when the two spots were still separated by a considerable distance.

The Gemini image was produced by Travis Rector of the University of Alaska Anchorage, Chad Trujillo of Gemini Observatory and the Gemini ALTAIR adaptive optics team.

Jupiter's Red Spots - A Primer

The Great Red Spot is truly enormous. Its size ranges from about 25,000 to 40,000 kilometers (15,500 to 25,000 miles) in its longest dimension (large enough to contain two to three Earths) and packs wind speeds of 560 kilometers/hour (350 miles/hour). Unlike hurricanes on Earth, which can dissipate over land in a matter of days, Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a product of strong convection currents that violently swirl gases in that region of the planet's atmosphere. It has probably persisted for centuries. First definitely recognized in 1879, the Great Red Spot appears identical to the "Permanent Spot" recorded on Jupiter in 1665 by Jean-Dominique Cassini I (1625-1712) in Italy and may be related to a spot noted by British observer Robert Hooke (1635-1703) in 1664. If so, the Great Red Spot has endured for at least 350 years. Jupiter has no solid surface that would deprive the storm of its condensing "fuel."

The formation of a new red spot on Jupiter, however, may also indicate a climate change on the planet. A recent study by Amy Simon-Miller (NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center) and Imke de Pater and Philip Marcus (University of California, Berkeley) shows that Red Spot Junior is gaining altitude. This indicates a temperature increase in that region. Marcus says that the relatively uniform temperature of Jupiter, where the temperatures at the poles are nearly the same as they are at the equator, is due to the chaotic mixing of heat and airflow from vortices in the planet's atmosphere. But Marcus predicted that the movement of heat from Jupiter's equator to its south pole would nearly shut off at 34˚ southern latitude. This is the same latitude where Red Spot Junior is located. This region may now be acting like a barrier that prevents the mixing of heat and airflow. If it is, Jupiter's equatorial regions will become warmer and its poles will become cooler. Consequently, the planet's average temperature at some latitudes could change by as much as 5.5 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit).

Technical Data:
Jupiter and Red Spots:

Near-infrared image of Jupiter obtained on the night of July 14, 2006 (UT, July 13 HST) using ALTAIR, the natural/laser guide star adaptive optics system (in natural guide star mode, with field lens) on the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai'i.

Original data are available for downloading by scientists and amateurs at the Gemini Science Archive

Note: Registered users can obtain data by sorting on UT date (July 14) and Science Programme: GN-2006A-DD-2

Field of view: 41 arcseconds

Orientation: north up, east left

Some image contrast enhancement was applied to this image using the "Smart Sharpening Filter" in Adobe Photoshop (registered). See original image here



Source: Gemini Observatory Press Release

The W. M. Keck Observatory press release is reproduced below:

Kamuela, Hawaii (July 29th, 2006) – Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii this month snapped high-resolution near-infrared images of the Great Red Spot, a persistent, high-pressure storm on Jupiter, as a smaller storm, Red Spot Jr., breezed by it on its race around the planet.



Click image for a larger view.
[Above]: A false-color composite near-infrared image of Jupiter and its moon Io, taken July 20 Hawaii time (July 21 UT) by the Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea using adaptive optics (AO) to sharpen the image.

Images taken in narrow band filters centered at 1.29 and 1.58 microns (shown in gold in this image) detect sunlight reflected off Jupiter’s upper cloud deck—the same clouds that are seen in visible light. The narrow band image at 1.65 micron (shown in blue) shows sunlight reflected back from hazes lying just above these clouds. The image was sharpened using the RegiStax software, developed by Cor Berrevoets. The fact that Io looks larger in the blue than in the other colors is an artefact of the image processing. Because Jupiter is much less bright in the methane band (1.65 filter), it had to be brightened relative to the other colors, which increased Io's apparent size.

The planet Jupiter is 143,000 km (90,000 miles) across. The Great Red Spot is about twice the diameter of Earth, while Red Spot Jr. has a diameter nearly equal to that of Earth. Resolution is about 0.1 arcseconds, or 370 kilometers (250 miles). The AO system used the satellite Io as its reference star. Io itself is visible in the upper right corner in the green, red and blue colors of the 1.29, 1.58 and 1.65 micron filters, respectively. The motion of the satellite with respect to Jupiter during the observing sequence is clearly seen.

Red Spot Jr., which is below the Great Red Spot, is not as bright, either because its clouds are less dense and thus reflect less light, or because the tops of the clouds are not as high as those of the larger spot. The red outline shows the approximate area covered by the 5-micron band mosaic shown on the right.
Credit: Imke de Pater, Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Al Conrad (Keck), and Chris Go (Cebu, Philippines)

The image, which also shows Jupiter’s moon Io, was taken on July 20 Hawaii time (July 21 Universal Time) by the Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea using adaptive optics (AO) to sharpen the image.

The spots are of interest to astronomers because Red Spot Jr. formed from the merger of three white spots only recently, between 1998 and 2000, and in December 2005 turned red like the much older Great Red Spot. While the new red spot is about the size of Earth, the Great Red Spot is nearly twice that diameter and has been circling the planet for at least 342 years.

The images captured by the second-generation Near Infrared Camera (NIRC2) on Keck II show that, though the two red spots are about the same color when seen in visible wavelengths (see Christopher Go’s optical image from July 20 UT), they differ markedly at infrared wavelengths. When the astronomers viewed the planet through a narrow-band filter centered on the 1.58 micron, near-infrared wavelength, Red Spot Jr., which was called Oval BA before it changed from white to red, was a lot darker, indicating that the tops of the storm clouds may be lower than those of the Great Red Spot. With more atmosphere above its cloud tops, more infrared light is absorbed by molecules like methane in the atmosphere.

“Red Spot Jr. is either not as high as the Great Red Spot, or it’s just not as reflective, that is, as dense,” said lead astronomer Imke de Pater, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. “These images will put some constraints on the altitude of Red Spot Jr.”

The Great Red Spot is thought to tower about 8 kilometers (5 miles) above the surrounding cloud deck. The fact that Red Spot Jr. turned red may indicate its swirling storm clouds are rising higher also, though apparently they are not as high as those of its larger companion, or the clouds are thinner.

Why the spots are red is a subject of great debate. Some people think the hurricane-like winds in the Great Red Spot, which can reach 400 miles per hour, dredge up material from deeper in the planet’s atmosphere that, when exposed to ultraviolet light, turns red. One candidate is phosphine gas, PH3, which has been detected on Jupiter. Ultraviolet light might catalyze its conversion to red phosphorus, P4, according to one of the leading theories. Other, more complicated theories have phosphine interacting in the atmosphere with chemicals such as methane or ammonia to form complex compounds such as methylphosphane or phosphaethyne.

Recent studies suggest that the red color also may be attributed to sulfur allotropes, that is, different molecular configurations, including chains and rings, of pure sulfur, such as S3-S20. The new work hypothesizes that ammonium hydrosulfide particles are carried upwards in the Great Red Spot and are broken up by ultraviolet light. Subsequent chemical reactions ultimately lead to long-chained sulfur allotropes , which can vary in color from red to yellow.

“The jury is still out on the exact processes that lead to the red coloration of the Great Red Spot – and Oval BA,” de Pater is quoted as saying in the August 2006 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.

Christopher Go, an amateur astronomer who first noticed the coloration change of Red Spot Jr., joined de Pater’s team earlier this year. He noted that during the close encounter between the two spots, Red Spot Jr. was squashed slightly, stretching in its direction of motion. The same thing happened in 2002 and 2004 when the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr. passed one another, though then Junior was white.

The Great Red Spot rotates westward, opposite to the eastward rotation of the planet. Because alternating bands on the Jovian surface move in opposite directions, the adjacent Red Spot Jr. moves eastward. The planet rotates about once every 10 hours.

Another of de Pater’s colleagues, UC Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Philip Marcus, predicted several years ago that Jupiter’s climate was changing, based on the disappearance of the cyclonic storms or spots within the bands. The mixing of the atmosphere by these cyclones keeps the temperature about the same over the entire planet, he argued, so loss of this mixing will cause the equator to heat up and the poles to cool.

Earlier this year, on April 16, de Pater and her team captured near-infrared, ultraviolet and visible light photos of the planet using the Hubble Space Telescope to look more closely at the two red spots. The observations with the Keck Telescope were a follow-up study to try to measure the speeds of the swirling winds in the spots. Jupiter’s brightness, however, confused the adaptive optics system, forcing the astronomers to miss some good shots of the planet as the guide star was being positioned optimally relative to Jupiter.

“This was probably the most challenging observation ever tried with the AO system at Keck,” said de Pater, referring to use of the laser guide star system next to an object as bright as Jupiter. Adaptive optics can take the twinkle out of an object caused by thermal motion in the atmosphere, but to do this well, the target must be near another bright object that can serve as a reference. For some of the images, Jupiter’s moon Io was used as the reference “star.” But until Io got close enough for this, a laser guide star was created near Jupiter to serve this purpose.

“This was our first attempt using the laser to obtain AO-corrected images of Jupiter’s surface,” said Dr. Al Conrad, a support astronomer at the Keck Observatory. “The technique shows promise and, if we perfect it, will provide us with many more opportunities to observe this fascinating, ever-changing object.”

The team also obtained a close-up of the two spots through a narrow-band filter centered on 5 microns, which samples thermal radiation from deep in the cloud layer. Both spots appear dark because the clouds completely block heat emanating from lower elevations, though narrow regions around the spots that are devoid of clouds show leakage of this heat out into space.

“These 5 micron images reveal details in the cloud opacity not seen at the other wavelengths and will help unravel the vertical structure of the spots,” UC Berkeley team member Michael Wong added. “The smooth, narrow arcs visible to the south of each spot probably result from the interaction between the spots and high-speed winds that are deflected around them.”



Click image for a larger view.
[Above]: A closeup of the two red spots through a 5-micron filter, which samples thermal radiation from deep in the cloud layer. Both spots appear dark because the clouds completely block heat emanating from lower elevations, though narrow regions around the spots that are devoid of clouds show leakage of heat into space. This 5-micron mosaic image reveals details in the cloud opacity not seen at the other wavelengths, and will help unravel the vertical structure of the spots.
Credit: Imke de Pater, Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Al Conrad (Keck), and Chris Go (Cebu, Philippines)

The resolution using both the narrow and wide views on the camera was about 0.1 arcseconds, or only half as good as can be obtained on a clear night with optimal seeing.

The Keck observing support team included Conrad, Terry Stickel, David Le Mignant and Marcos van Dam

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates twin 10-meter telescopes located on the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii and is managed by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a non-profit corporation whose board of directors includes representatives from Caltech, the University of California and NASA. For more information, please visit http://www.keckobservatory.org.

Source: W. M. Keck Observatory press release

The highest wind speeds in Jupiter's Little Red Spot have increased and are now equal to those in its older and larger sibling, the Great Red Spot, according to observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The Little Red Spot's winds, now raging up to approximately 400 miles per hour, signal that the storm is growing stronger, according to the NASA-led team that made the Hubble observations. The increased intensity of the storm probably caused it to change color from its original white in late 2005, according to the team.

Image above: These are two views of Jupiter's Little Red Spot taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in April 2006. The left image is a close-up view. In the right image, a box has been added to show the Little Red Spot's location on Jupiter. The larger Great Red Spot, which has been observed for the past 400 years, can be seen to the right. Print-resolution image (1 meg jpg image)
Credit: NASA / ESA / Amy Simon-Miller

"No one has ever seen a storm on Jupiter grow stronger and turn red before," said Amy Simon-Miller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a paper describing the new observations appearing in the journal Icarus. "We hope continued observations of the Little Red Spot will shed light on the many mysteries of the Great Red Spot, including the composition of its clouds and the chemistry that gives it its red color."

Although it seems small when viewed against Jupiter's vast scale, the Little Red Spot is actually about the size of Earth, and the Great Red Spot is around three Earth diameters across. Both are giant storms in Jupiter's southern hemisphere powered by warm air rising in their centers.

The Little Red Spot is the only survivor among three white-colored storms that merged together. In the 1940s, the three storms were seen forming in a band slightly below the Great Red Spot. In 1998, two of the storms merged into one, which then merged with the third storm in 2000. In 2005, amateur astronomers noticed that this remaining, larger storm was changing color, and it became known as the Little Red Spot after becoming noticeably red in early 2006.

The new Hubble observations by the team reveal that winds in the Little Red Spot have grown stronger compared to previous observations. In 1979, Voyager 1 and 2 flew by Jupiter and recorded that top winds were only about 268 miles per hour in one of the "parent" storms that merged to become the Little Red Spot. Nearly 20 years later, the Galileo orbiter revealed that top wind speeds were still the same in the parent storm, but winds in the Great Red Spot blew at up to 400 miles per hour. The team used Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument to discover that top wind speeds in both storms are now the same, because this instrument has enough resolution to track small features in these storms, revealing their wind speeds.

Scientists are not sure why the Little Red Spot is growing stronger. One possibility is a change in size. These storms naturally fluctuate in size, and their winds spin around their central core of rising air. If the storm were to become smaller, its spiraling winds would increase the same way spinning ice skaters turn faster by pulling their arms closer to their bodies. Another possibility is that it's the only survivor. "The lack of other large storms in the same latitude on Jupiter leaves more energy to feed the Little Red Spot," said Simon-Miller.

According to the team, the increased intensity of the Little Red Spot probably explains why it changed color. It is likely to be behaving like the Great Red Spot for two reasons: it has the same wind speed and the team's color analysis showed that it really is the same color as the Great Red Spot. It's probably pulling up gaseous material from far below that changes color when exposed to ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. The question remains whether the storm is pulling up something that it wasn't before, because its increased intensity allows it to reach deeper, or whether it is pulling up the same material but the higher winds allow the storm to hold it aloft longer, increasing the time it is exposed to solar ultraviolet light and turning it red.

The team could confirm exactly what the red material is if they are able to use a technique called spectroscopy in future observations of the Little Red Spot. Spectroscopy is an analysis of the light given off by an object. Each element and chemical gives a unique signal - brightness at specific colors or wavelengths. Identifying these signals reveals an object's composition.

However, spectroscopy of Jupiter's atmosphere is complicated because it has many chemicals that could turn red if exposed to ultraviolet light. "We need to simulate different possible Jupiter atmospheres in a lab so we can discover what spectrometric signals they give. We will then have something to compare with the actual spectrometric signal," said Simon-Miller.

The team includes Simon-Miller, Dr. Nancy J. Chanover and Michael Sussman of New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, N.M.; Dr. Glenn S. Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Irene G. Tsavaris of the University of Maryland, College Park; and Dr. Erich Karkoschka of the University of Arizona, Tucson.


Bill Steigerwald
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Source: NASA/GSFC - News

The University of Arizona press release is reproduced below:


Jupiter as seen from Mars -- courtesy of the HiRISE
camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The
HiRISE camera - the most powerful telescope beyond
Earth orbit - is good for astronomy as well as detailed
pictures of Mars.
(Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

By Lori Stiles
January 31, 2007

The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can take interesting astronomical pictures, team scientists report today.

The High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) based at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson has produced a view of Jupiter as seen from Mars orbit.

The scientists used the HiRISE camera to take a 10 megabyte image of Jupiter and its major satellites when they were calibrating the camera's pointing and color response on Jan. 11, 2007. The team is releasing a version of that image today on the HiRISE Webpage, http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu.

The image successfully served its purpose for the calibration tests. However, the raw image was blurred because of an oversight in planning the unusual observation. Since, Dennis Gallagher, the HiRISE chief optical designer, formerly with Ball Aerospace, Boulder, Colo., and now with CDM-Optics in Boulder, sharpened the image.

With this sharpening, and because Mars is closer to Jupiter than Earth is, this image has comparable resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope's pictures of Jupiter, team members noted in the image caption.

The colors seen by the HiRISE camera are not those we humans would see because the camera detects light at a slightly longer wavelength that our eyes do.

The High Resolution Science Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) team, led by University of Arizona Professor Alfred S. McEwen, is based at UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. HiRISE began the science phase of the mission in November, 2006, and posts new images and captions on the Internet at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu every Wednesday.

More information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission is available at http://www.nasa.gov/mro. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

Source: UA Press Release

Observation ID PSP_002162_9030
Release date 31 January 2007
Image Products Full browse version


Suggested media credit: Image NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The HiRISE camera is the most powerful telescope to have left Earth orbit. As such, it is capable of some interesting astronomical observations.

This image of Jupiter and its major satellites (10 MB) was acquired to calibrate the pointing and color response of the camera. An oversight in planning this unusual observation put the focus mechanism in the wrong location, blurring the image. This does not detract from the calibration objectives, but makes the raw image less esthetic.

To compensate, the image has been "sharpened" on the ground by Dennis Gallagher, the HiRISE chief optical designer. With this sharpening, and because Mars is closer to Jupiter than Earth is, this image has comparable resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope's pictures of Jupiter.

The colors are not what is seen by the human eye because HiRISE is able to detect light with a slightly longer wavelength than we can (that is, the infrared).

While there is no standard observation geometry, this image was acquired on 11 January 2007, 2102 spacecraft event time to be precise.

Observation Geometry
No geometry information found for: PSP_002162_9030

Source: HiROC

This week the, Pluto bound, New Horizons spacecraft made a fly-by of Jupiter. The main purpose of this fly-by was to achieve a gravitational "sling-shot", picking up speed from it's encounter with the giant planet and hence reducing the flight time to distant Pluto. The opportunity to make observations of Jupiter and it's moons was not missed and the spacecraft is return images to Earth now (see the New Horizons Mission thread).

New Horizon's Jovian observations were supported by two of NASA's space telescopes. Hubble observed Jupiter in visible and ultra-violet wavelengths whilst Chandra observed in X-ray wavelengths.

Hubble Follows Jupiter Aurorae

March 1, 10:00 AM (EST)

News Release Number: STScI-2007-11

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

Combined ultraviolet- and visible-light images of Jupiter from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope were taken from February 17-21 in support of the New Horizons flyby of Jupiter on February 28.

The image segments in the boxes were obtained using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys's ultraviolet camera. The ultraviolet images show auroral emissions that are always present in the polar regions of Jupiter. They are typically 10-100 times brighter than the northern lights seen on the Earth. The aurorae are produced when charged particles from the Sun become trapped in Jupiter's powerful magnetic field. They cause gasses to fluoresce high in Jupiter's atmosphere, near the planet's magnetic poles.

The equatorial regions of Jupiter in this photo were imaged in blue light on February 17, 2007 by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. This reveals cloud features in Jupiter's main atmosphere. In the ultraviolet views, the atmosphere looks more hazy because sunlight is reflected from higher in the atmosphere.

Hubble will continue to photograph Jupiter as well as its volcanically active moon, Io, over the next month as the New Horizons spacecraft flies past Jupiter. New Horizons is en route to Pluto, and made its closest approach to Jupiter on February 28, 2007.

Through combined remote imaging by Hubble and in situ measurements by New Horizons, the two missions will enhance each other scientifically, allowing scientists to learn more about the Jovian atmosphere, the aurorae, and the charged-particle environment of Jupiter and its interaction with the solar wind.

Object Name: Jupiter

Image Type: Astronomical/Illustration

Credit: NASA/ESA, and John Clarke (Boston University)

Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

Jupiter's Northern Aurora

News Release Number: STScI-2007-11

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

Jupiter's northern aurora was obtained using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys's ultraviolet camera.

Object Name: Jupiter

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA/ESA, and J. Clarke (Boston University)

Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

Jupiter's Southern Aurora

News Release Number: STScI-2007-11

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

Jupiter's southern aurora was obtained using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys's ultraviolet camera.

Object Name: Jupiter

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA/ESA, and J. Clarke (Boston University)

Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

The Equatorial Regions of Jupiter

News Release Number: STScI-2007-11

Object Name: Jupiter

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA/ESA, and J. Clarke (Boston University)

Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

Hubble Images Jupiter in Support of the New Horizons Flyby

News Release Number: STScI-2007-11

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this true-color view of Jupiter in support of the New Horizons Mission. The image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on February 17, 2007, using the planetary camera detector. Jupiter's trademark belts and zones of high- and low-pressure regions appear in crisp detail. Circular convection cells can be seen at high northern and southern latitudes. Atmospheric features as small as 250 miles (400 km) across can be discerned.

Hubble will continue to photograph Jupiter as well as its volcanically active moon, Io, over the next month as the New Horizons spacecraft flies past Jupiter. New Horizons is en route to Pluto, and made its closest approach to Jupiter on February 28, 2007.

Through combined remote imaging by Hubble and in situ measurements by New Horizons, the two missions will support each other scientifically to learn more about the Jovian atmosphere, the aurorae, and the charged-particle environment of Jupiter and its interaction with the solar wind.

Object Name: Jupiter

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

Hubble Observes Volcanic Io

News Release Number: STScI-2007-11

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is monitoring the volcanically active moon Io in support of the February 28 New Horizons spacecraft flyby of Jupiter. These images were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on February 14, 2007. The left image, taken in natural color, reveals orange oval deposits of sulfur around the Pele volcano, and other familiar surface features on Io, which is innermost of the Galilean satellites. The ultraviolet image on the right shows a big plume rising above the surface, not far from the north pole. Though Io is no bigger than Earth's geologically dead Moon, Io's interior is kept molten due to the gravitational tug of Jupiter and the other Galilean satellites.

Hubble will continue to photograph Io, as well as Jupiter over the next month, as the New Horizons spacecraft flies past Jupiter. New Horizons is en route to Pluto, and made its closest approach to Jupiter on February 28, 2007.

Through combined remote imaging by Hubble and in situ measurements by New Horizons, the two missions will enhance each other scientifically, allowing scientists to learn more about the Jovian atmosphere, the aurorae, and Jupiter's charged-particle environment and its interaction with the solar wind.

Object Name: Jupiter

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Spencer (SwRI)

Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

On February 28, 2007, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on its ultimate journey to Pluto. This flyby gave scientists a unique opportunity to study Jupiter using the package of instruments available on New Horizons, while coordinating observations from both space- and ground-based telescopes including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.



In preparation for New Horizon's approach of Jupiter, Chandra took 5-hour exposures of Jupiter on February 8, 10, and 24th. In this new composite image, data from those separate Chandra's observations were combined, and then superimposed on the latest image of Jupiter from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The purpose of the Chandra observations is to study the powerful X-ray auroras observed near the poles of Jupiter. These are thought to be caused by the interaction of sulfur and oxygen ions in the outer regions of the Jovian magnetic field with particles flowing away from the Sun in the so-called solar wind. Scientists would like to better understand the details of this process, which produces auroras up to a thousand times more powerful than similar auroras seen on Earth.

Following closest approach on the 28th, Chandra will continue to observe Jupiter over the next few weeks. New Horizons will take an unusual trajectory past Jupiter that takes it directly down the so-called magnetic tail of the planet, a region where no spacecraft has gone before. The sulfur and oxygen particles that dominate Jupiter's magnetosphere and originate in Io's volcanoes are eventually lost down this magnetic tail. One goal of the Chandra observations is to see if any of the X-ray auroral emissions are related to this process.

By combining Chandra observations with the New Horizons data, plus ultraviolet information from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and FUSE satellite, and optical data from ground-based telescopes, astronomers hope to get a more complete picture of Jupiter's complicated system of particles and magnetic fields and energetic particles. In the weeks and months to come, astronomers will undertake detailed analysis of this bounty of data.


Fast Facts for Jupiter:

Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/SwRI/R.Gladstone et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage (AURA/STScI)
Scale Image is 61 arcsec across.
Category Solar System
Observation Dates February 8, 10 & 24, 2007
Observation Time 15 hours
Obs. IDs 7405, 8216, 8217
Color Code X-ray: purple; Optical: black & white
Instrument ACIS
Distance Estimate Jupiter as seen at a distance of about 400 million miles.
Release Date March 1, 2007

Source: Chandra - Photo Album

waspie you are the man, those were frillen amazing photos ,you always deliver the goods here bro thanks and awesome

March 29, 2007: So you thought Northern Lights were big in Alaska? "That's nothing," says Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. "Jupiter has auroras bigger than our entire planet."

Last month, Gladstone and colleagues used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture this picture:


Above: X-ray auroras observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory overlaid on a simultaneous optical image
from the Hubble Space Telescope. [More]

The purple ring traces Jupiter's X-ray auroras. Gladstone calls them "Northern Lights on steroids. They're hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth."

Chandra has observed Jupiter's auroras many times before, but this recent dataset is exceptional both in length and quality. Gladstone hopes it will help him solve some mysteries lingering for almost 30 years.

Jupiter's auroras were discovered by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979. A thin ring of light on Jupiter's nightside looked like a stretched-out version of our own auroras on Earth. But those early photos merely hinted at the power involved. The real action, astronomers soon learned, was taking place at high-energy wavelengths invisible to the human eye. In the 1990s, ultraviolet cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope photographed raging lights thousands of times more intense than anything ever seen on Earth, while X-ray observatories saw auroral bands and curtains bigger than Earth itself.

Jupiter's hyper-auroras never stop. "We see them every time we look," says Gladstone. You don't see auroras in Alaska every time you look, yet on Jupiter the Northern Lights always seem to be "on."

Gladstone explains the difference: On Earth, the most intense auroras are caused by solar storms. An explosion on the sun hurls a billion-ton cloud of gas in our direction, and a few days later, it hits. Charged particles rain down on the upper atmosphere, causing the air to glow red, green and purple. On Jupiter, however, the sun is not required. "Jupiter is able to generate its own lights," says Gladstone.

The process begins with Jupiter's spin: The giant planet turns on it axis once every 10 hours and drags its planetary magnetic field around with it. As any science hobbyist knows, spinning a magnet is a great way to generate a few volts—it's the basic principle of DC motors. Jupiter's spin produces 10 million volts around its poles.

"Jupiter's polar regions are crackling with electricity," says Gladstone, "and this sets the stage for non-stop auroras."

The polar electric fields grab any charged particles they can find and slam them into the atmosphere. Particles for slamming can come from the sun, but Jupiter has another, more abundant source nearby: the volcanic moon Io, which spews oxygen and sulfur ions (O+ and S+) into Jupiter's spinning magnetic field.


Above: A volcano on Io, photographed
by New Horizons in Feb. 2007. [More]

Somehow, these ions make their way to Jupiter's poles where electric fields send them hurtling toward the planet below. Upon entering the atmosphere, "their electrons are first stripped away by molecules they run into, but as they slow down they start grabbing electrons back. The 'charge exchange reaction' produces intense X-ray auroras," he explains.

So Jupiter's Northern Lights are, in a sense, volcano powered. Mystery solved? Not quite.

No one knows exactly how volcanic exhaust meanders from Io out through Jupiter's magnetosphere and back to Jupiter's poles. "We're still trying to figure it out," says Gladstone.

But that is a minor detail compared to another, even bigger puzzle: There is an X-ray "pulsar" inside Jupiter's northern auroras. Sometimes Chandra sees it, sometimes not. When it's on, the pulsar emits gigawatt bursts of X-rays with a regular beat of 45 minutes.


Above: X-ray flashes from Jupiter's
north pole. [More]

Gladstone suspects the pulsar has nothing to do with Io's volcanoes, but instead is caused by the sun. "Maybe Jupiter's magnetic field, when it gets hit by a solar wind gust, rings like a bell with a 45-minute period," he speculates. "There are many other possibilities as well."

The February 2007 dataset may hold important clues. "Chandra observed the auroras for 15 hours, and we weren't the only ones watching," he says. The Hubble Space Telescope, the FUSE satellite, XMM-Newton (a European X-ray observatory), the New Horizons spacecraft and many ground-based observatories were all taking data at the same time. The campaign was timed to coincide with New Horizons flyby of Jupiter—a slingshot maneuver designed to increase its velocity en route to Pluto.

"Jupiter's auroras have never been observed by so many telescopes at once," says Gladstone. "I'm really excited by these data, and the analysis is just beginning."

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Production Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

____________________________________________

More Information

Chandra X-ray Observatory -- mission home page

FUSE Observes Jupiter in Support of the New Horizons Flyby --

Grand Theft Pluto -- (Science@NASA) New Horizons flew past Jupiter on Feb. 28th and stole some velocity for its trip to Pluto

Chandra Probes High-Voltage Auroras on Jupiter

Aurora and possible lightning on Jupiter -- This is the discovery image of auroras on Jupiter taken by Voyager 1 about 6 hours after closest approach on 5 March 1979. The camera is looking back into Jupiter's shadow from a distance of 320,000 km. The north pole is on the limb at upper center, and the light along the limb is an aurora. The bright spots near the center and bottom of the frame are thought to be lightning, displaced diagonally due to scan platform stepping during

NASA's Future: The Vision for Space Exploration

Source: Science@NASA

June 28, 2007 01:00 PM (EDT) (EDT)

News Release Number: STScI-2007-25

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:
Massive Jupiter is undergoing dramatic atmospheric changes that have never been seen before with the keen "eye" of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Jupiter's turbulent clouds are always changing as they encounter atmospheric disturbances while sweeping around the planet at hundreds of miles per hour. But these Hubble images reveal a rapid transformation in the shape and color of Jupiter's clouds near the equator, marking an entire face of the globe.

The planet is wrapped in bands of yellows, browns, and whites. These bands are produced by the atmosphere flowing in different directions at various latitudes. Lighter-hued areas where the atmosphere rises are called zones. Darker regions where the atmosphere falls are called belts. When these opposing flows interact, storms and turbulence appear.

Between March 25 and June 5, Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 captured entire bands of clouds changing color. Zones have darkened into belts and belts have lightened and transformed into zones. Cloud features have rapidly altered in shape and size.

The image at left shows a thin band of white clouds above Jupiter's equator. The white color indicates clouds at higher altitudes in Jupiter's atmosphere. In the image at right, the band's white hue has turned brown, showing clouds deep within the planet's atmosphere. The whole band appears to have merged with the one below it.

In the same cloud band above the equator, the small swirls in the left-hand image have morphed into larger wave-like features in the right-hand photo. Dominating the band is a dark streak that resembles a snake. This serpent-shaped structure is actually a small tear in the cloud deck, which gives astronomers a view deep within the atmosphere.

Below the equatorial region, the brownish upside-down shark fin in the left-hand image disappears in the photo at right. Appearing instead are brownish tongue-shaped clouds with a stream of white swirls below them.

These global upheavals have been seen before, but not with Hubble's sharp resolution. Astronomers using ground-based telescopes first spied drastic atmospheric transformation in the 1980s. Another major disturbance was seen in the early 1990s, after Hubble was launched into space. The telescope, however, did not have the resolution to view the upheaval in fine detail. These higher-quality Hubble images may help astronomers understand how such global upheavals develop on Jupiter.

For additional information, contact:

Donna Weaver/Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4493/4514; dweaver@stsci.edu/villard@stsci.edu

Dr. Amy Simon-Miller
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-6738; amy.simon@nasa.gov

Object Names: Jupiter

Image Type: Astronomical

Credits : NASA, ESA, A. Simon-Miller (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), A. Sánchez-Lavega, R. Hueso, and S. Pérez-Hoyos (University of the Basque Country), E. García-Melendo (Esteve Duran Observatory Foundation, Spain), and G. Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is reproduce below:

San Antonio -- Oct. 23, 2007 -- Space physicists have long assumed that the magnetosphere at Jupiter circulates that planet's magnetic field in the same way as Earth. At Earth, this circulation drives the aurora and the magnetic storms that cause space weather. Researchers from Southwest Research Institute and the University of Colorado at Boulder have developed a new model that postulates the structure and magnetospheric processes at Jupiter are significantly different from those at Earth.

The invisible area of space around a planet controlled by its magnetic field, the magnetosphere, interacts with the high-speed solar wind in a complex way, particularly in the area where the magnetic field in the solar wind interconnects with the planetary field, through a process called magnetic reconnection. The Dungey cycle, developed by British scientist Jim Dungey in 1961, is the scientifically accepted paradigm for explaining how magnetic reconnection circulates the Earth's magnetic field. During this cycle, magnetic field lines are brought up near the nose of the magnetosphere where they interconnect, becoming "open" and coupling the energy from the motion of the solar wind into the magnetosphere. That interconnection allows vast energy from the million mile-per-hour solar wind into the magnetosphere, which is the driving force behind geomagnetic storms, or space weather, that can seriously damage or destroy probes and satellites. Subsequent motion of the solar wind around the Earth's magnetosphere drags the interconnected field lines back over its magnetic poles where they drift down into the center of the magnetotail and reconnect again, but this time with similar field lines from the opposite hemisphere so that they are "closed" or connected to the planet at both ends. Finally, the Dungey cycle completes as the newly closed field lines circulate back toward Earth, around to its dayside and back to its starting position at the nose of the magnetosphere.

Image courtesy Fran Bagenal

Image courtesy Fran Bagenal

About 1 ton of volcanic gases are spewed out by Jupiter’s Moon Io every second. When ionized these gases become trapped in Jupiter’s strong magnetic field (shown in blue) and form a vast ring (shown in red) around the planet with Jupiter’s 10-hour spin period. Jupiter’s strong magnetic, rapid rotation and Io’s prodigious source of material result in a giant magnetosphere (middle) that dwarfs the magnetosphere of the Earth. The entire magnetosphere of Earth would fit within the planet Jupiter. The contrast in size, spin and internal sources makes the dynamics of the Jovian magnetosphere very different from the situation at Earth.

"For years space physicists have considered the Dungey cycle to be the dominant circulation process in magnetospheres throughout the solar system, even though observations from the largest magnetosphere in the solar system - Jupiter's - didn't add up," says Dr. David McComas, senior executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute.

"There are three key ways that the magnetosphere of Jupiter differs from that of Earth," argues Dr. Fran Bagenal, a professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU. "It's much bigger, it spins faster and it has a powerful source of material."

The large size of the Jovian magnetosphere means that the time it takes for material that reconnects in the magnetotail and moves back up to Earth is only about 10 hours, less than half a day. However, the process at Jupiter takes 750 to 1,000 hours.

"Consider that a Jupiter day is only about 10 hours," says McComas. "That means it would take as many as 100 Jovian days for reconnected field lines to move back up to Jupiter - a staggering difference."

Furthermore, the magnetosphere of Jupiter is coupled to the spinning planet. "Imagine stirring up a bowl of spaghetti," says Bagenal. "The fast, 10-hour spin of the Jovian magnetic field complicates the topology of flux tubes that are connected to the planet on one end while the other, open end is swept away by the solar wind."

Another difference is that Jupiter has an active volcanic moon, Io, which spews out roughly a ton of material, mostly sulfur and oxygen, every second. Half of that material is lost through a process called charge exchange, but the other half moves down the Jovian magnetotail as ions dragging the planetary magnetic field tailward. Earth has no such counterpart to impede the return flow back toward the planet.

The new theory suggests a different geometry for closing off the magnetic field that has become interconnected with the solar wind - additional magnetic reconnection with other solar wind field lines that produce closed planetary field lines by reconnecting with open lines anchored back to both magnetic poles. This geometry at Jupiter allows for tailward flow everywhere in the tail and doesn't require a planetward flow, as at Earth. This explains why the polar aurora at Jupiter doesn't look like the terrestrial aurora. It also explains why observations from Ulysses showed that open flux occurs at low latitudes, not at the high latitudes required at Earth. The magnetosphere at Jupiter drags the material further down the sides so that they occur at lower latitudes.

"Our model matches up with the observations - further evidence that the magnetospheric structure and processes at Earth and Jupiter are quite different," says McComas.

McComas and Bagenal determined these processes for Jupiter, yet they could aid in understanding the magnetospheres of the other outer planets, as well as in other astrophysical environments where magnetic fields play an important role.

The paper, "Jupiter: A Fundamentally Different Magnetospheric Interaction with the Solar Wind," by David J. McComas and Fran Bagenal will be published in the Oct. 24 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

For more information contact Maria Martinez at (210) 522-3305, Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, PO Drawer 28510, San Antonio, TX 78228-0510.

Source: SwRI press release

The Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin press release is reproduced below:

December 13, 2007

Jupiter’s moon Europa is just as far away as ever, but new research is bringing scientists closer to being able to explore its tantalizing ice-covered ocean and determine its potential for harboring life.

“We’ve learned a lot about Europa in the past few years,” says William McKinnon, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.

Possible Sequence of Europa Exploration. Almost 30 years ago, Voyagers 1 and 2 (lower left) made their historic rendezvous with the Jupiter system, and first revealed Europa’s icy covered surface to human eyes. In 1995 the Galileo spacecraft went into orbit about Jupiter, and for years studied the giant planet and its major moons. From this mission, we learned that Europa is a world covered with a global ocean about 100 km (60 miles) deep, and that this ocean was capped, liked the Earth’s Arctic Ocean, with a shell of solid ice. To learn more about this ocean and the ice shell above, and especially to investigate ocean’s suitability to sustain life, will require the next step, a future mission dedicated to exploring Europa from orbit about the moon itself (center). Both NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency) are actively studying launching such a mission in the next 10 years. If such a mission is launched, and depending on what is found, future missions to Europa may involve landers or even autonomous vehicles — called cryobots (upper right) — that melt through the ice to explore the ocean below, perhaps sometime later in this century. Credit: NASA/JPL.

“Before we were almost sure that there was an ocean, but now the scientific community has come to a consensus that there most certainly is an ocean. We’re ready to take the next step and explore that ocean and the ice shell that overlays it. We have a number of new discoveries and techniques that can help us do that.”

McKinnon is discussing some of these recent findings and new opportunities for exploring Europa in a news briefing today at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. He is joined by colleagues Donald Blankenship, research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, and Peter Doran, associate professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago.

McKinnon points to refined methods that can use combined measurements of gravity and the magnetic field made from orbit to characterize Europa's ocean. By observing how the moon flexes and deforms and by measuring magnetic variations, researchers can determine how thick or thin the ice is over the ocean and even learn how salty the ocean is. A new model shows that radiation on Europa is much less, up to two-thirds less, than previous models predicted, making the environment much more hospitable for orbiting spacecraft or landers to operate.

Sophisticated reprocessing of data from the Galileo mission has revealed new information about the chemistry of Europa’s surface. It maps the presence of carbon dioxide, an important chemical for life, most probably coming from the ocean beneath the surface. This indicates that improved measurements from orbit have the chance to detect compounds not found in the Galileo data.

Future explorations of Europa will benefit from lessons learned from the Cassini spacecraft’s recent findings of active geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. “Europa is a young, geologically active body like Enceladus,” says McKinnon. Galileo didn’t see any plumes on Europa like those spouting from Enceladus, but it didn’t have the best instrumentation to detect the telltale hot spots. “Now we know what we should look for,” says McKinnon, “and we should expect the unexpected.”

Thick or thin ice shell on Jupiter’s moon Europa? Scientists are all but certain that Europa has an ocean underneath its surface ice, but do not know how thick this ice might be. This artists’ conception illustrates two possible cut-away views through Europa’s ice shell. In both heat escapes, possibly volcanically, from Europa’s rocky mantle and is carried upward by buoyant oceanic currents. If the heat from below is intense and the ice shell is thin enough (left), the ice shell can directly melt, causing what are called “chaos” on Europa, regions of what appear to be broken, rotated, and tilted ice blocks. On the other hand, if the ice shell is sufficiently thick (right), the less intense interior heat will be transferred to the warmer ice at the bottom of the shell, and additional heat is generated by tidal squeezing of the warmer ice. This warmer ice will slowly rise, flowing as glaciers do on Earth, and the slow but steady motion may also disrupt the extremely cold, brittle ice at the surface. Europa is no larger than Earth’s moon, and its internal heating stems from its eccentric orbit about Jupiter, seen in the distance. As tides raised by Jupiter in Europa’s ocean rise and fall, they may cause cracking, additional heating, and even venting of water vapor into the airless sky above Europa’s icy surface. (Artwork by Michael Carroll.) Credit: NASA/JPL

New radar sounding techniques will be a key component for exploring Europa. “There have been theories about whether the ice above the ocean is thick or thin, and now we have the ability to determine this with radar,” says Blankenship. “That’s been proved by the radar on Mars Express, which imaged the north polar cap of Mars, and the higher-resolution radar on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Radar can give us a detailed cross section through the ice shell on Europa.” The ice-penetrating radar will also be able to locate liquid water both within and beneath the shell, he continues, just as it can spot water within crevasses and lakes beneath the ice of Antarctica. "Free water within the icy shell and its relationship to the underlying ocean will be a critical factor in determining the habitability of Europa."


Byrd Glacier, Antarctica. Exploration on Earth of analogs to Europa's ice-covered ocean will be critical steps toward launching an exploration of Europa. Antarctica's ice-covered lakes will offer testing grounds for an array of technologies that could prove useful in space. Credit: University of Texas Institute for Geophysics/Jackson School of Geosciences.

Researchers are also preparing for the day in the future when they will be able to get to Europa's surface and ultimately into its ocean to explore it directly. "In the meantime, we're using extreme environments on Earth as our laboratory," says Doran. "Ice-covered lakes in Antarctica are good, small-scale analogs to what we might find on Europa." Doran is lead investigator of a project called Endurance, which, in collaboration with Stone Aerospace, is developing an autonomous underwater robotic vehicle, to test approaches and procedures for exploring Europa's ocean. The project is funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets program.

"We're testing the vehicle in Wisconsin in February 2008," Doran says, "and then we'll be deploying it in Antarctica later in the year." The robotic explorer will be able to create three-dimensional maps of the subsurface Antarctic lake. It will also be able to map the biochemistry of the water body, pinpointing the chemical signatures that may indicate life.

For Europa, under-ice exploration lies in the distant future. In the meantime, say the researchers, a closer look at Europa is possible from an orbiting spacecraft able to measure gravity and magnetic fields, determine surface composition, search for active or recent eruptions, and use radar to understand the relationship between the surface and the sub-surface.

For more information about the Jackson School, contact J.B. Bird at jbird@jsg.utexas.edu, 512-232-9623.

To talk to William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis, contact Susan Killenberg McGinn smcginn@wustl.edu, 314-935-5254.

Source: Jackson School of Geosciences Press Release

News Release Number: STScI-2008-06



ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

Detailed analysis of two continent-sized storms that erupted in Jupiter's atmosphere in March 2007 shows that Jupiter's internal heat plays a significant role in generating atmospheric disturbances. Understanding this outbreak could be the key to unlock the mysteries buried in the deep Jovian atmosphere, say astronomers.

Understanding these phenomena is important for Earth's meteorology where storms are present everywhere and jet streams dominate the atmospheric circulation. Jupiter is a natural laboratory where atmospheric scientists study the nature and interplay of the intense jets and severe atmospheric phenomena.

An international team coordinated by Agustin Sánchez-Lavega from the Universidad del País Vasco in Spain presents its findings about this event in the January 24 issue of the journal Nature.

The team monitored the new eruption of cloud activity and its evolution with an unprecedented resolution using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, and telescopes in the Canary Islands (Spain). A network of smaller telescopes around the world also supported these observations.

According to the analysis, the bright plumes were storm systems triggered in Jupiter's deep water clouds that moved upward in the atmosphere vigorously and injected a fresh mixture of ammonia ice and water about 20 miles (30 kilometers) above the visible clouds. The storms moved in the peak of a jet stream in Jupiter's atmosphere at 375 miles per hour (600 kilometers per hour). Models of the disturbance indicate that the jet stream extends deep in the buried atmosphere of Jupiter, more than 60 miles (approximately100 kilometers) below the cloud tops where most sunlight is absorbed.

For additional information, contact:

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4514
villard@stsci.edu

Carolina Carnalla-Martinez
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif
818-354-9382
carnalla@jpl.nasa.gov

Agustin Sánchez-Lavega
Universidad del País Vasco, Spain
011-34-94-601-4255
agustin.sanchez@ehu.es

Object Name: Jupiter

Image Type: Astronomical/Illustration

Credit: NASA, ESA, IRTF, and A. Sánchez-Lavega and R. Hueso (Universidad del País Vasco, Spain )


Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

The University of Maryland press release is reproduced below:

For Immediate Release
April 30, 2008
Contacts: Lee Tune, 301 405 4679 or ltune@umd.edu



COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Scientists from the University of Maryland and the Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany appear to have solved a long-standing mystery about the cause of anomalies in Jupiter's gossamer rings.

In a new study published in the May 1 issue of Nature, they report that a faint extension of the outermost ring beyond the orbit of Jupiter's moon Thebe, and other observed deviations from an accepted model of ring formation, result from the interplay of shadow and sunlight on dust particles that make up the rings.

"It turns out that the outer ring's extended boundary and other oddities in Jupiter's rings really are 'made in the shade,'" saidn Douglas Hamilton, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland. "As they orbit about the planet, dust grains in the rings alternately discharge and charge when they pass through the planet's shadow. These systematic variations in dust particle electric charges interact with the planet's powerful magnetic field. As a result small dust particles are pushed beyond the expected ring outer boundary, and very small grains even change their inclination, or orbital orientation, to the planet."



Hamilton and German co-author Harald Krüger studied for the first time new impact data on dust grain sizes, speeds, and orbital orientations taken by the spacecraft Galileo during its traversal of Jupiter's rings in 2002-2003, as part of its deliberate maneuvering for a death plunge into the planet. Krüger analyzed the new data set and Hamilton created elaborate computer models that matched dust and imaging data on Jupiter's rings and explained the observed eccentricities.

"Within our model we can explain all essential structures of the dust ring we observed," said Krüger.


Read a Q & A in Nature (Authors-
Abstractions) about this research with
UM's Doug Hamilton.

According to Hamilton, the mechanisms identified in this paper affect the rings of any planet in any solar system, but the effects may not be as evident as it is at Jupiter. "The icy particles in Saturn's famous rings are too large and heavy to be significantly shaped by this process, which is why similar anomalies are not seen there," he said. "Our findings on the effects of shadow may also shed some light on aspects of planetary formation because electrically charged dust particles must somehow combine into larger bodies from which planets and moons are ultimately formed."

Jupiter, Galileo and the Mystery of the Rings

=Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, has 63 known moons. The dust forming Jupiter's faint rings is produced when bits of space debris smashes into the small inner moons Adrastea, Metis, Amalthea and Thebe (closest to farthest). This dust is organized into a main ring, an inner halo, and two fainter and more distant gossamer rings. The rings largely are bounded by the orbits of these four moons, but a faint outward protrusion of dust extending beyond the orbit of Thebe (The-be) has, until now, mystified scientists.

Italian scientist Galileo Galilei was the first to discover that Jupiter had moons. Galileo first observed the planet's four largest moons in 1610.

On December 7, 1995 NASA's Galileo spacecraft reached Jupiter and began the first of 35 orbits around the planet. Over seven years the spacecraft took some 14,000 images of Jupiter, its moons and rings. It also released a probe that sent back the information on the planet's atmosphere. On September 21, 2003 the Galileo spacecraft was put into a controlled dive to end its mission, by plummeting through Jupiter's atmosphere. In addition to its imaging instruments, the spacecraft carried a supersensitive dust detector, which registered thousands of impacts from dust particles on its way through Jupiter's ring system in 2002 and 2003. The Thebe extension was one of the many new discoveries made by the Galileo spacecraft.
The overall Galileo mission was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which also built its main (orbiter) spacecraft.

Click here to view animations by Hamilton and colleagues showing orbits and relative speeds around the sun of Jupiter and the other planets , and then click on Jupiter in the list of planets to see it the orbiting of its 64 moons.

Source: UM Press Release

The Carnegie Institution for Science press release is reproduced below:

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Washington, D.C.—Curved features on Jupiter’s moon Europa may indicate that its poles have wandered by almost 90°, report scientists from the Carnegie Institution, Lunar and Planetary Institute, and University of California, Santa Cruz in the 15 May issue of Nature. Such an extreme shift suggests the existence of an internal liquid ocean beneath the icy crust, which could help build the case for Europa as possible habitat for extraterrestrial life.

The research team, which included Isamu Matsuyama of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and colleagues Paul Schenk and Francis Nimmo, used images from the Voyager, Galileo, and New Horizons spacecraft to map several large arc-shaped depressions that extend more than 500 kilometers across Europa’s surface. With a radius of about 1500 kilometers, Europa is slightly smaller than the Earth’s moon.

By comparing the pattern of the depressions with fractures that would result from stresses caused by a shift in Europa’s rotational axis, the researchers determined that the axis had shifted by approximately 80°. The previous axis of rotation is now located about 10° from the present equator.

The drastic shift in Europa’s rotational axis was likely a result of the build-up of thick ice at the poles. “A spinning body is most stable with its mass farthest from its spin axis,” says Matsuyama. “On Europa, variations in the thickness of its outer shell caused a mass imbalance, so the rotation axis reoriented to a new stable state.”

Such a change is called “true polar wander” as opposed to apparent polar wander caused by plate tectonics. There is evidence for true polar wander on Earth, and also on Mars and on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. “Our study adds Europa to this list,” says Matsuyama. “It suggests that planetary bodies might be more prone to reorientation than we thought.”

The study also has implications for liquid water inside Europa. Scientists have hypothesized that Europa has an extensive subsurface ocean based on spacecraft photos that revealed its fractured, icy surface. The ocean beneath the crust would be kept liquid by heat generated by tidal forces from Jupiter’s gravity. The presence of heat and water may make life possible, even though the subsurface ocean is cut off from solar energy.

“The large reorientation on Europa required to explain the circular depressions implies that its outer ice shell is decoupled from the core by a liquid layer,” says Matsuyama. “Therefore, our study provides an independent test for the presence of an interior liquid layer.”.

Source: Carnegie Institution Press Release

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory press release is reproduced below:

May 20, 2008

Media Contacts
M. Buckley, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
(240) 228-7536 or (443) 778-7536

Using data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft and two telescopes at Earth, an international team of scientists has found that one of the solar system’s largest and newest storms – Jupiter’s Little Red Spot – has some of the highest wind speeds ever detected on any planet.

The New Horizons researchers combined observations from their Pluto-bound spacecraft, which flew past Jupiter in February 2007; data from the Hubble Space Telescope orbiting Earth, and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, perched on an Atacama Desert mountain in Chile. This is the first time that high resolution, close–up imaging of the Little Red Spot has been combined with powerful Earth–orbital and ground-based imagery made at ultraviolet through mid–infrared wavelengths.

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Jupiter’s "LRS" is an anticyclone, a storm whose winds circulate in the opposite direction to that of a cyclone – counterclockwise, in this case. It is nearly the size of Earth and as red as the similar, but larger and more well known, Great Red Spot (or GRS). The dramatic evolution of the LRS began with the merger of three smaller white storms that had been observed since the 1930s. Two of these storms coalesced in 1998, and the combined pair merged with a third major Jovian storm in 2000. In late 2005 – for reasons still unknown — the combined storm turned red.

The new observations confirm that wind speeds in the LRS have increased substantially over the wind speeds in the precursor storms, which had been observed by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions in past decades. Researchers measured the latest wind speeds and directions using two image mosaics from New Horizons' telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken 30 minutes apart in order to track the motion of cloud features. New Horizons obtained the images from a distance of approximately 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Jupiter at a resolution of 14.4 kilometers (8.9 miles) per pixel. The LRS' maximum winds speeds of about 384 miles per hour (between 155 – 190 meters per second) far exceed the156 mile-per-hour threshold that would make it a Category 5 storm on Earth.

"This storm is still developing, and some of the changes remain mysterious,” says Dr. Andrew Cheng of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md., who led the study team. “This unique set of observations is giving us hints about the storm's structure and makeup; from this, we expect to learn much more about how these large atmospheric disturbances form on worlds across the solar system."

Jupiter's venerable Great Red Spot has decreased steadily in size over the past several decades. In addition, a rare "global upheaval" in Jupiter's atmosphere began before New Horizons visited last year. This upheaval involved the disappearance of activity in the South Equatorial Belt (which left the GRS as an isolated storm), the appearance of a south tropical