Tag: Juno

A Lazy Summer Day at 1400°C

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Chemistry, Physics: Entropy and Thermodynamics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Susan Kim and Kareem are supervising while Cal mounts a new poster in the place of honor behind his cash register. “A little higher on the left, Cal.”

“How’s this, Susan? Hey, Sy, get over here and see this. Ain’t it a beaut?”

“Nice, Cal. What’s it supposed to be? Is that Jupiter in the background?”

“Yeah, Jupiter all right. Foreground is supposed to be a particular spot on its moon Io. They think it’s a lake of molten sulfur!”

“No way, from that picture at least! I’ve seen molten sulfur. It goes from pale yellow to dark red as you heat it up, but never black like that.”

“It’s not going to be lab-pure sulfur, Susan. This is out there in the wild so it’s going to be loaded with other stuff, especially iron. But the molten sulfur I’ve seen in volcanoes is usually burning with a blue flame. I guess the artist left that out.”

“No oxygen to burn it with, Kareem. Why did you mention iron in particular?”

“Yeah, this article I took the image from says that lake’s at 1400°C. I thought blast furnaces ran hotter than that.”

I’ve been looking things up on Old Reliable. “They do, Cal, typically peaking near 2000°C.”

“So if this lake has iron in it, why isn’t the iron solid?”

“Same answer as I gave to Susan, Cal. The iron’s not pure, either. Mixtures generally melt or freeze at lower temperatures than their pure components. Sy would probably start an entropy lecture—”

“I would.”

“But I’m a geologist. Earth is about ⅓ iron. That’s mixed in with about 10% as much sulfur, mostly in the core where pressures and temperatures are immense. We want to understand conditions down there so we’ve spent tons of lab time and computer time to determine how various iron‑sulfur mixtures behave at different temperatures and pressures. It’s complicated.” <brings up an image on his phone> “Here’s what we call the system’s phase diagram.”

“You’re going to have to read that to us.”

Adapted from Walder and Pelton
Click image to expand

“I expected to. Temperature increases along the y‑axis. Loki’s temp is at the dotted red line. Left‑to‑right we’ve got increasing sulfur:iron ratios — pure iron on the left, pure sulfur on the right. The idea is, pick a temperature and a mix ratio. The phase diagram tells you what form or forms dominate. The yellow area, for instance, is liquid — molten stuff with each kind of atom moving around randomly.”

“What’s the ‘bcc’ and ‘fcc’ about?”

“I was going to get to that. They’re abbreviations for ‘body‑centered cubic’ and ‘face‑centered cubic’, two different crystalline forms of iron. The fcc form dominates below that horizontal line at about 1380°C, converts to bcc above that temperature. Pure bcc freezes at about 1540°C, but add some sulfur to the molten material and you drive that freezing temperature down along the blue‑yellow boundary.”

“And the gray area?”

“Always a fun thing to explain. It’s basically a no‑go zone. Take the point at 1400°C and 80:20 sulfur:iron, for instance. The line running through the gray zone along those red dots, we call it a tie line, skips from 60:40 to 95:5, right? That tells you the 60:40 mix doesn’t accept additional sulfur. The extra part of the 80:20 total squeezes out as a separate 95:5 phase. Sulfur’s less dense than iron so the molten 95:5 will be floating on top of the 60:40. Two liquids but they’re like oil and water. If you want a uniform 80:20 liquid you have to shorten the tie line by raising the temp above 2000°C.”

“All that’s theory. Is there evidence to back it up?”

“Indeed, Sy, now that Juno‘s up there taking pictures. When the spacecraft rounded Io last February JunoCam caught several specular reflections of sunlight just like it had bounced off mirrors. At first the researchers suspected volcanic glass but the locations matched Loki and other hot volcanic calderas. The popular science press can say ‘sulfur lakes’ but NASA’s being cagey, saying ‘lava‘ — composition’s probably somewhere between 10:90 and 60:40 but we don’t know.”

Artist’s concept of Loki Patera,
a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

~ Rich Olcott

Completing The Triad

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Mathematics: Spherical Harmonics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Walt’s mustache bristles as he gives me the eye. ”You claim three harmonics control how the Sun’s gravity could affect spacecraft orbits around a target planet like Jupiter. You said we don’t have to care about Jupiter’s gravitational zones and isolating the sectors probably isn’t doable. What’s the third?”

Time to twist the screws. ”Three harmonic systems, Walt, all working together and you’ve got their names wrong. They control nothing, they’re a framework for analysis. And Jupiter’s special. Solar gravity doesn’t affect its zonal harmonic arcs but that’s only because Jupiter’s polar axis is nearly perpendicular to its orbital plane. Zonal‑effect N‑S twisting at Jupiter is pennies on a C‑note. Any mission we send to Mars, Saturn or Uranus we’ll care a lot about their zonal harmonics because their axes have more tilt. An 82° tilt for Uranus, can’t get much more tilted than that. Sectorial harmonics may still help us navigate there because Uranus probably has a lot less magnetism than Jupiter.”

That rocks him but he comes back strong. ”The third kind of harmonic?!! C’mon, give!”

“Radial, the center‑out dimension. The gravitational force between bodies depends on center‑to‑center distances so yeah, your people would be interested.”

“I presume radial harmonics have numbers like Jn and Cm do?”

“They do. Sorry, this’ll get technical again but I’ll go as light as I can. Each radial harmonic is the product of two factors. You know about factors, right?”

“Sure, force multipliers.”

“You would know that kind. More generally, factors are things that get multiplied together. I’ll call the general radial harmonic Rn. It’s the product of two factors. The first is a sum of terms that begin with rn, where r is the distance. For instance, R3‘s first factor would look like a*r³+b*r²+c*r+d, where the a,b,c,d are just some numbers. Different radial harmonics have different exponents in their lead terms. You still with me?”

“Polynomials from high school algebra. Tell me something new.”

“The second factor decreases exponentially with n*r. No matter how large rn gets, when you multiply an rn polynomial by something that decreases exponentially, the (polynomial)×(exponential) product eventually gets really small.”

“Give me a second. … So what you’re saying is, at a big enough distance these radial harmonics just die away.”

“That’s where I was going.”

“How far is ‘enough’?”

“Depends on n. Higher values of n shut down faster.”

“So these Cms and Jns and Rns just add together?” <pauses, squints at me suspiciously> “Is there some reason you used n for both Jn and Rn?”

“No but yes, and yes. You combine a C, a J and an R using multiplication to get a full harmonic F, except there are rules. The J and R must belong to the same n. The m can’t be larger than n. From far away we’d model Jupiter’s gravity as F000=R0×J0×C0, which is an infinite sphere — R0 never dies away and J0×C0 says ‘no angular dependence.’ The Sun’s gravity acts along R0 and that’s what keeps Jupiter in orbit. If the problem demands combining full harmonics, you use addition.” <rousing a display on Old Reliable> “Here’s how a particular pair of harmonics combine to increase or decrease spherical gravity in specific directions.”

“But Juno doesn’t see those gravity lumps until it gets close‑in. How close?”

“R2‘s down to less than a part per thousand at three planetary radii, call it 225 000 kilometers away from the planet’s center.”

“How much time is it closer than that distance?”

“Complicated question. A precise answer requires some calculus — is your smart phone set up for elliptic integrals?”

“Of course not. A good estimate will do.”

“Okay, here’s the plan. What we’d like is total time spent while Juno travels along the ellipsoidal arc between points A and D where the orbit crosses the 225 000‑km circle. Unfortunately, Juno speeds up approaching point P, slows down going away — calculating the A‑D time is tricky. I’ll assume Juno travels straight lines AB and CD at the A-speed. I’ll also approximate the orbit’s close pass as a semicircle at P‑speed.” <tapping> “I get a 3.6-hour duration, less than 0.3% of the full 53-day orbit. Will that satisfy your people?”

“You’ll know if it doesn’t.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Screaming Out Of Space

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Mathematics: Spherical Harmonics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cal (formerly known as Al) comes over to our table in his coffee shop. “Lessee if I got this right. Cathleen is smug twice. First time because the new results from Juno‘s data say her hunch is right that Jupiter’s atmosphere moves like cylinders inside each other. Nearly cylinders, anyhow. Second smug because Sy used the Juno data to draw a math picture he says shows the Great Red Spot but I’m lookin’ at it and I don’t see how your wiggle‑waggles show a Spot. That’s a weird map, so why’re you smug about it, Cathleen?”

“The map’s weird because it’s abstract and way different from the maps you’re used to. It’s also weird because of how the data was collected. Sy, you tell him about the arcs.”

“Okay. Umm… Cal, the maps you’re familiar with are two‑dimensional. City maps show you north‑south and east‑west, that’s one dimension for each direction pair. Maps for bigger‑scale territories use latitude for north‑south and longitude for east‑west but the principle’s the same. The Kaspi group’s calculations from Juno‘s orbit data give us a recipe for only a one‑dimensional map. They show how Jupiter’s gravity varies by latitude, nothing about longitude. We could plot that as a rectangle, latitude along the x‑axis, relative strength along the y‑axis. I thought I’d learn more by wrapping the x‑axis around the planet so we could look for correlations with Jupiter’s geography. I found something and that’s why Cathleen’s smug. Me, too.”

“Why latitude but nothing about longitude?”

“Because of the way Juno‘s orbit works. The spacecraft’s not hovering over the planet or even circling it like the ISS circles Earth. NASA wanted to minimize Juno‘s exposure to Jupiter’s intense magnetic and radiation fields. The craft spends most of its 53‑day orbit at extreme distance, up to millions of kilometers out. When it approaches, it screams in at about 41 kilometers per second, that’s 91 700 mph, on a mostly north‑to‑south vector so it sees all latitudes from a few thousand kilometers above the cloud‑tops. Close approach lasts only about three hours, for the whole planet, and then the thing is on its way out again. During that three hours, the planet rotates about 120° underneath Juno so we don’t have a straight vertical N‑S pass down the planet’s face. Gathering useful longitude data’s going to take a lot more orbits.”

“So you’re sayin’ Juno felt gravity glitches at all different angles going pole to pole, but only some of the angles going round and round.”

“Exactly.”

“So now explain the wiggle‑waggles.”

“They represent parts‑per‑million variations in the field pulling Juno towards Jupiter at each latitude. Where the craft is over a more massive region it’s pulled a bit inwards and Sy’s map shows that as a green bump. Over a lighter region Juno‘s free to move outward a little and the map shows a pink dip. Kaspi and company interpret the heaviness just north of the equator to be a dense inward flow of gas all around the planet. Maybe it is. Sy and I think the pink droplet south of the equator could reflect the Great Red Spot lowering the average mass at its latitude. Maybe it is. As always, we need more data, okay? Now I’ve got questions for you, Sy.”

“Shoot.”

“You built your map by multiplying each Jn‑shape by its Kaspi gravitational intensity then adding the multiplied shapes together. But you only used Jn‑shapes with integer names. Is there a J½?”

“Some mathematicians play with fractional J‑thingies but I’ve not followed that topic.”

“Understandable. Next question — the J‘s look so much like sine waves. Why not just use sine‑shapes?”

“I used Jn‑shapes because that’s how Kaspi’s group stated their results. They had no choice in the matter. Jn‑shapes naturally appear in spherical system math. The nice thing about Jn‑shapes is that n provides a sort of wavelength scale. For instance, J35 divides Jupiter’s pole‑to‑pole arc into 36 segments each as wide as Earth’s diameter. Here’s a plot of intensity against n.”

Adapted from Kaspi, Figure 2a

“Left to right, red light to blue.”

“Exactly.”

~ Rich Olcott

Lemon, Vanilla, Cinnamon

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Al claims that lemon’s a Summertime flavor, which is why his coffee shop’s Scone Flavor of the Month in July is lemon even though it doesn’t go well with his coffee. “Give me one of those lemon scones, Al, and an iced tea. It’s a little warm out there this morning.”

“Sure thing, Sy. Say, what’s the latest science-y thing up in the sky?”

“Oh, there’s a bunch, Al. The Japanese Hayabusa-2 spacecraft collected another sample from asteroid Ryugu. NASA’s gravity-sniffer GRAIL lunar orbiter found evidence for a huge hunk of metallic material five times larger than the Big Island of Hawai’i buried deep under the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin. The Insight Mars lander’s seismometer heard its first Marsquake —“

“Quit yanking my chain, Sy. Anything about Jupiter?”

“Gotcha, Al. I know Jupiter’s your favorite planet. As it happens I do have some Jupiter news for you.”

“The Juno orbiter’s still working, I hope.”

“Sure, sure, far as I know. It’s about to make its 13th close flyby of Jupiter, and NASA administrators have green-lighted the mission to continue until July 2021. Lots of data for the researchers to work on for years. Here’s a clue — what’re the top three things that everyone knows about Jupiter?”

“It’s the biggest planet, of course, and it’s got those stripes and the Great Red Spot. Has the planet gotten smaller somehow?”

“No, but the stripes and the Red Spot are acting weird. Had you heard about that?”

“No, just that the Spot’s huge and red and been there for 400 years.”

“Mmm, we’re not sure about the 400 years. But yes, it’s huge.”

“Four times wider than Earth, right?”

“Hasn’t been that big for a long time. Back in the 1870s telescope technology gave the astronomers that ‘four Earths wide‘ estimate. But the Spot’s shrunk in the last 150 years.”

“A whole lot?”

“Last measurement I saw, it’s just barely over one Earth wide. Seems to have gotten a bit taller, though, and maybe deeper.”

“Taller and deeper? Huh, that’s a new one. I always thought of the Spot as just this big oval ring on Jupiter’s surface.”

“Everyone has that bogus idea of Jupiter as a big smooth sphere with stripes and ovals and swirls painted on it. Don’t forget, we’re looking down at cloud tops, like those satellite pictures we get looking down at a storm system on Earth. From space, one of our hurricanes looks like a spirally disk centered on a dark spot. That dark spot isn’t in the clouds, it’s actually the top of the ocean, miles below the clouds. If you were a Martian working with photos from a telescope on Phobos, you’d be hard-put to figure that out. You need 3-D perspective to get planets right.”

Jupiter image courtesy ESA/Hubble

“Those stripes and stuff aren’t Jupiter’s surface?”

“As far as we can tell, Jupiter doesn’t have a surface. The hydrogen-helium atmosphere just gets denser and denser until it acts like a liquid. There’s a lot of pressure down there. Juno recently gave us evidence for a core that’s a fuzzy mix of stony material and maybe-metallic maybe-solid hydrogen but if that mush is real it’s only 3% of the planet’s mass. Whatever, it’s thousands of miles below what we see. Jupiter’s anything but smooth.”

“Lumps and bumps like this bubbly scone, huh?”

“More organized than that, more like corduroy or a coiled garden hose. The white stripes are hundreds of miles higher-up than the brown stripes so north-to-south it’s like a series of extreme mountain ranges and valleys. The Great Red Spot reaches up maybe 500 miles further.”

“Does that have to do with what they’re made of?”

“It has everything to do with that, we think. You know Earth’s atmosphere has layers, right?”

“Yeah, the stratosphere’s on top, then you got the weather layer where the clouds are.”

“Close enough. Jupiter has all that and more. Thanks to the Galileo probe we know that Jupiter’s ‘weather layer’ has a topmost blue-white cloud layer of ammonia ice particles, a middle red-to-brown layer containing compounds of ammonia and sulfur, and a bottommost white-ish layer of water clouds. The colors we see depend on which layer is exposed where.”

“But why’re they stripey?”

~~ Rich Olcott

A Recourse to Pastry

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Astronomy: Techniques, Physics: Fundamentals, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s something wrong about the displays laid out on Al’s pastry counter — no symmetry.  One covered platter holds eight pinwheels in a ring about a central one, but the other platter’s central pinwheel has only a five-pinwheel ring around it.  I yell over to him.  “What’s with the pastries, Al?  You usually balance things up.”

“Ya noticed, hey, Sy?  It’s a tribute to the Juno spacecraft.  She went into orbit around Jupiter on the 5th of July 2016 so I’m celebrating her anniversary.”

“Well, that’s nice, but what do pinwheels have to do with the spacecraft?”

“Haven’t you seen the polar pictures she sent back?  Got a new poster behind the cash register.  Ain’t they gorgeous?”Jupiter both poles“They’re certainly eye-catching, but I thought Jupiter’s all baby-blue and salmon-colored.”

Astronomer Cathleen’s behind me in line.  “It is, Sy, but only in photographs using visible sunlight.  These are infrared images, right, Al?”

“Yeah, from … lemme look at the caption … Juno‘s JIRAM instrument.”

“Right, the infrared mapper.  It sees heat-generated light that comes from inside Jupiter.  It’s the same principle as using blackbody radiation to take a star’s temperature, but here we’re looking at a planet.  Jupiter’s way colder than a star so the wavelengths are longer, but on the other hand it’s close-up so we don’t have to reckon with relativistic wavelength stretching.  At any rate, infrared wavelengths are too long for our eyes to see but they penetrate clouds of particulate matter like interstellar dust or the frigid clouds of Jupiter.”

Jupiter south pole 1
NASA mosaic view of Jupiter’s south pole by visible light

“So this red hell isn’t what the poles actually look like?”

“No, Al,  the visible light colors are in the tops of clouds and they’re all blues and white.  These infrared images show us temperature variation within the clouds.  Come to think of it, that Hell’s frozen over — if I recall correctly, the temperature range in those clouds runs from about –10°C to –80°C.  In Fahrenheit that’d be from near zero to crazy cold.”

“Those aren’t just photographs in Al’s poster?”

“Oh, no, Sy, there’s a lot of computer processing in between Juno‘s wavelength numbers and what the public sees.  The first step is to recode all the infrared wavelengths to visible colors.  In that north pole image I’d say that they coded red-to-black as warm down to white as cool.  The south pole image looks like warmest is yellow-to-white, coolest is red.”

“How’d you figure that?”

“The programs fake the apparent heights.  The warmest areas are where we can see most deeply into the atmosphere, which would be at the center or edge of a vortex.  The cooler areas would be upper-level material.  The techs use that logic to generate the perspective projection that we interpret as a 3-D view.”

Vinnie’s behind us in line and getting impatient.  “I suppose there’s Science in those pretty pictures?”

“Tons of it, and a few mysteries.  JIRAM by itself is telling the researchers a lot about where and how much water and other small molecules reside in Jupiter’s atmosphere.  But Juno has eight other sensors.  Scientists expect to harvest important information from each of them.  Correlations between the data streams will give us exponentially more.”

He’s still antsy.  “Such as?”

“Like how Jupiter’s off-axis magnetic field is related to its lumpy gravitational field.  When we figure that out we’ll know a lot more about how Jupiter works, and that’ll help us understand Saturn and gas-giant exoplanets.”GRS core

Al breaks in.  “What about the mysteries, Cathleen?”

“Those storms, for instance.  They look like Earth-style hurricanes, driven by upwelling warm air.  They even go in the right direction.  But why are they crammed together so and how can they stay stable like that?  Adjacent gears have to rotate in opposite directions, but these guys all go in the same direction.  I can’t imagine what the winds between them must be like.”

“And how come there’s eight in the north pole ring but only five at the other pole?”

“Who knows, Vinnie?  The only guess I have is that Jupiter’s so big that one end doesn’t know what the other end’s doing.”

“Someone’s gonna have to do better than that.”

“Give ’em time.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Planetary Pastry, First Course

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Astronomy: Techniques, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Morning, Al.  What’s the scone of the day?”

“No scones today, Sy.  Cathleen and one of her Astronomy students used my oven to do a whole batch of these orange-and-apricot Danishes.  Something to do with Jupiter.  Try one.”Great Apricot Spot 1
Cathleen was standing behind me.  “They’re in honor of NASA’s Juno spacecraft.  She just completed a close-up survey of Jupiter’s famous cloud formation, the Great Red Spot.  Whaddaya think?”

“Not bad.  Nice bright color and a good balance of sweetness from the apricot against tartness from the orange.”

“You noticed that, hey?  We had to do a lot of balancing — flavors, colors, the right amount of liquid.  Too juicy and the pastry part comes out gummy, too dry and you break a tooth.  Notice something else?”

“The structure, right?  Like the Spot’s collar around a mushed-up center.”

“Close, but Juno showed us that center’s anything but mushed-up.  <pulls out her smartphone>  Here’s what she sent back.”

GRS 1 @400
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Jason Major

“See, it’s swirls within swirls. We tried stirring the filling to look like that but it mostly smoothed out in the baking.”

“Hey, is it true what I heard that the Great Red Spot has been there for 400 years?”

“We think so, Al, but nobody knows for sure.  When Galileo published his telescopic observations of Jupiter in 1610 he didn’t mention a spot.  But that could be because he’d already caught flak from the Church by describing mountains and craters on the supposedly perfect face of the Moon.   Besides, the Jovian moons he saw were much more exciting for the science of the time.  A planet with satellites was a direct contradiction to Aristotle’s Earth-centered Solar System.”

“OK, but what about after Galileo?”

“There are records of a spot between 1665 and 1713 but then no reports of a spot for more than a century.  Maybe it was there and nobody was looking for it, maybe it had disappeared.  But Jupiter’s got one now and it’s been growing and shrinking for the past 185 years.”

“So what is it, what’s it made of and why’s it been there so long?”

“Three questions, one of them easy.”

“Which is easy, Sy?”

“The middle one.  The answer is, no-one knows what it’s made of.  That’s part of Juno‘s mission, to do close-up spectroscopy and help us wheedle what kinds of molecules are in there.  We know that Jupiter’s mostly hydrogen and helium, just like the Sun, but both of those are colorless.  Why some of the planet’s clouds are blue and some are pink — that’s a puzzle, right, Cathleen?”

“Well, we know a little more than that, especially since the Galileo probe dove 100 miles into the clouds in 1995.  The white clouds are colder and made of ammonia ice particles.  The pink clouds are warmer and … ok, we’re still working on that.”

“What about my other two questions, Cathleen?”

“People often call it a hurricane, but that’s a misnomer.  On Earth, a typical hurricane is a broad, complex ring of rainstorms with wind speeds from 75 to 200 mph.  Inside the ring wall people say it’s eerily calm.  The whole thing goes counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, clockwise in the southern one.”

“So how’s the Great Red Spot different?”

“Size, speed, complexity, even direction.  East-to-west, the Spot is eight times wider than the biggest hurricanes.  Its collar winds run about 350 mph and it rotates counterclockwise even though it’s in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere.  It’s like a hurricane inside-out.”

“It’s not calm inside?”

“Nope, take another look at that Juno image.  There’s at least three very busy bands wrapped around a central structure that looks like it holds three distinct swirls.  That’s the part that’s easiest to understand.” GRS core

“Why so?”

“Geometry.  Adjacent segments of separate swirls have to be moving in the same direction or they’ll cancel each other out.  <scribbles diagram on a paper napkin>  Suppose I’ve got just one inside another one.  If they go in the same direction the faster one speeds up the slower one and they merge.  If they go in opposite directions, one of them disappears.  If there’s more than one inner swirl, there has to be an odd number, see?”

“So if it’s not a hurricane, what is it?”

“Got any donuts, Al?”

~~ Rich Olcott