posted on 2021-03-23, 16:09authored byZhimeng Zhang, Virgil Adumitroaie, Michael Allison, John Arballo, Sushil Atreya, Gordon Bjoraker, Scott Bolton, Shannon Brown, Leigh N Fletcher, Tristan Guillot, Samuel Gulkis, Amoree Hodges, Andrew Ingersoll, Michael Janssen, Steven Levin, Cheng Li, Liming Li, Jonathan Lunine, Sidharth Misra, Glenn Orton, Fabiano Oyafuso, Paul Steffes, Michael H Wong
The Juno spacecraft provides unique close‐up views of Jupiter underneath the synchrotron radiation belts while circling Jupiter in its 53‐day orbits. The microwave radiometer (MWR) onboard measures Jupiter thermal radiation at wavelengths between 1.37 and 50 cm, penetrating the atmosphere to a pressure of a few hundred bars and greater. The mission provides the first measurements of Jupiter's deep atmosphere, down to ~250 bars in pressure, constraining the vertical distributions of its kinetic temperature and constituents. As a result, vertical structure models of Jupiter's atmosphere may now be tested by comparison with MWR data. Taking into account the MWR beam patterns and observation geometries, we test several published Jupiter atmospheric models against MWR data. Our residual analysis confirms Li et al.'s (2017, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL073159) result that ammonia depletion persists down to 50–60 bars where ground‐based Very Large Array was not able to observe. We also present an extension of the study that iteratively improves the input model and generates Jupiter brightness temperature maps which best match the MWR data. A feature of Juno's north‐to‐south scanning approach is that latitudinal structure is more easily obtained than longitudinal, and the creation of optimum two‐dimensional maps is addressed in this approach.
Funding
Juno mission. Grant Number: 699048X
History
Citation
Earth and Space Science, Volume 7, Issue 9, September 2020, e2020EA001229