SCIENCE

The first science results from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter portray the largest planet in our solar system as a complex, gigantic, turbulent world. (NASA)

D’you know about Juno? Catch up with our media-rich study guide!

Teachers, scroll down for a quick list of key resources in our Teachers Toolkit.

Discussion Ideas

• Why are Jupiter’s polar storms (like the swirls that dot the Jovian south pole above) so intriguing?
  • “We’re puzzled as to how they could be formed, how stable the configuration is, and why Jupiter’s north pole doesn’t look like the south pole,” says Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “We’re questioning whether this is a dynamic system, and are we seeing just one stage, and over the next year, we’re going to watch it disappear, or is this a stable configuration and these storms are circulating around one another?”
    • dynamic system. Earth’s storms are dynamic, meaning they are constantly changing and can be tracked in stages. (Using satellite data, you can track our planet’s dynamic storms using MapMaker Interactive.)
    • stable configuration. Meteorological conditions on gas giants can help some storms last for decades and even centuries. Saturn’s strange hexagonal storm (read about that here) and Jupiter’s own Great Red Spot are examples of fairly stable configurations, although they do change over time. (The Great Red Spot, for example, is becoming less great.)

• Juno is providing new information on the structure of Jupiter’s belts and zones. What are belts and zones?
  • Belts and zones describe the striped configuration of Jupiter’s clouds.
    • Belts are dark bands of clouds, generally thin and located at fairly low altitudes.
    • Zones are light bands of clouds, generally thicker than belts and located at high altitudes. Zones have lighter colors than belts due to a higher concentration of ammonia and light-reflecting ammonia ice.
  • One of the fascinating facts relayed by Juno is that these cloudy features may be more wispy than we thought. They didn’t show up when measured with microwave radiation. “These zones and belts either don’t exist or this instrument isn’t sensitive to it for some reason,” Bolton said. A band of ammonia in Jupiter’s equatorial region, however, was “the most startling feature that was brand-new and unexpected.”

• Jupiter’s magnetic fields are even stranger and lumpier than we thought. In a particularly stunning finding, Juno revealed that Jupiter’s magnetic fields are nearly twice as strong as anticipated. “Every flyby we execute gets us closer to determining where and how Jupiter’s dynamo works.” What is a dynamo? Skim our “dynamo theory” section here for some help.
  • A dynamo (or geodynamo) describes the process by which a planet generates a magnetic field. Both Jupiter and Earth have internal dynamos. According to NASA, “Jupiter is a gas giant that offers a clear view to its dynamo. In contrast, Earth’s dynamo is partially hidden beneath a layer of magnetized crustal rock.”
  • According to Nat Geo, “For a planet to have a geodynamo, it must rotate, it must have a fluid medium in its interior, the fluid must be able to conduct electricity, and it must have an internal energy supply that drives convection in the liquid.”
    • rotation. Jupiter is the fastest-spinning planet in the solar system, making a complete rotation about every 10 hours. (Earth, of course, takes about 24 hours to rotate.)
    • fluid. The fluid medium in Jupiter’s mysterious interior is truly exotic: metallic hydrogen. This liquid form of hydrogen does not exist on Earth, and was only created in a lab this year (2017). (Earth’s liquid outer core is made of iron and nickel.)
      • Another of Juno’s fascinating findings is that Jupiter’s magnetic field “might be generated by dynamo action closer to the surface, above the layer of metallic hydrogen.”
    • conductivity. Metallic hydrogen acts like an electrically conducting metal. (The liquid iron in Earth’s core is an excellent electrical conductor.)
    • energy supply. The energy supply feeding Jupiter’s dynamo is gravitational compression—leftover heat from the time the planet formed, about 4.5 billion years ago. (The energy supply that drives Earth’s dynamo is provided by gravitational compression and droplets of liquid iron freezing onto the solid inner core. Solidification releases heat energy.)

• Juno’s initial observations indicate that the processes that create polar auroras seem to work differently on Jupiter than Earth. How so? Skim our reference resource on Earth’s auroras for some help.
  • On Earth, auroras appear as charged particles from the sun (the solar wind) interact with particles from Earth’s magnetic field.
  • On Jupiter, Juno detected charged particles from inside the planet exiting the atmosphere and interacting with the planet’s magnetosphere. (That is so weird.)

• What’s next for Juno?
  • You tell us! The JunoCam community is an opportunity for citizen scientists (citizen astrophotographers!) to participate in the mission! Upload your images of Jupiter and help NASA decide what JunoCam will photograph. Learn about submission guidelines and join the discussion here.
  • Juno’s next scientific flyby—when the spacecraft goes “screaming by Jupiter, [getting] doused by a fire hose of Jovian science”—will be July 11. This flyby will take Juno “directly over one of the most iconic features in the entire solar system—one that every schoolkid knows—Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. If anybody is going to get to the bottom of what is going on below those mammoth swirling crimson cloud tops, it’s Juno and her cloud-piercing science instruments.” Learn more about those instruments here.

TEACHERS TOOLKIT

NASA: A Whole New Jupiter: First Science Results from NASA’s Juno Mission

New York Times: NASA’s Jupiter Mission Reveals the ‘Brand-New and Unexpected’Nat Geo: D’you Know About Juno?

NASA: JunoCam

NASA: Juno mission

(extra credit!) Science: Jupiter’s interior and deep atmosphere: The initial pole-to-pole passes with the Juno spacecraft

(extra credit!) Science: Jupiter’s magnetosphere and aurorae observed by the Juno spacecraft during its first polar orbits