IMAGE: SwRI scientists studied the area designed with the Juno UVS instrument on April 10, 2020, and concluded that a giant meteoroid had exploded in a bright fireball in Jupiter’s high atmosphere …. view more
Credit: SwRI
SAN ANTONIO – February 22, 2021 – From aboard the Juno spacecraft, an instrument led by the Southwest Research Institute that observed auroras saw a serendipitously bright flash above Jupiter’s clouds last spring. The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) team examined the data and concluded that they had captured a bolide, a highly visible meteoroid explosion in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant.
“Jupiter gets a lot of effects every year, a lot more on Earth, so effects themselves are not uncommon,” said Dr. Rohini Giles at SwRI, lead author of a paper outlining these findings. in Geophysical Research Letters. “However, they are so short-lived that it is relatively unusual to see them. Only larger impacts can be seen from Earth, and you must be lucky enough to point a telescope at Jupiter at the exact right moment. In the last decade, amateur astronomers have captured six influences on Jupiter. “
Since Juno Jupiter arrived in 2016, UVS has been used to study the morphology, brightness and celestial properties of Jupiter’s auroras such as the spacecraft’s near-surface spacecraft every 53 days. Through a 30-second spin, UVS monitors a swath of the planet. Occasionally the UVS instrument has seen local, short-term ultraviolet emissions outside the auroral zone, including a single event on April 10, 2020.
“This scene is from a tiny picture in time – Juno is a spinning spacecraft, and our instrument looked at that point on the planet for just 17 milliseconds, and we don’t know what happened to the clear flash outside of that time, “Giles said,” But we know we didn’t see it on spin earlier or on spin later, so it must have been very short-lived . “
Previously, UVS had seen a set of eleven non-moving mobile flashes lasting 1 to 2 milliseconds. They have been identified as Luminous Transient Events (TLEs), high spectra in the electronically induced atmosphere. The team initially thought that this flash might be TLE, however, it differed in two main ways. Although also short-lived, it lasted at least 17 milliseconds, much longer than TLE. It also had very different celestial properties. Spectra of TLEs and auroras reflect molecular hydrogen emissions, the main component of Jupiter’s atmosphere. This bolide incident had a smooth “blackbody” curve, which is what is expected from a meteor.
“The flash time and spectral shape match well with our expectations of impact,” said Giles. different than the UV emissions from the auroras of Jupiter. From the UV spectrum, we can see that the emission came from a blackbody with a temperature of 9600 Kelvin, located at an altitude of 140 miles above the top of the planet’s clouds. Looking at the brightness of the bright flame, we estimate that it was caused by an impact with a mass of 550-3,300 pounds. “
Comet Shoemaker-Levy was the most seen Jupiter conqueror. The comet exploded in July 1992 and crashed in Jupiter in July 1994, closely watched by astronomers around the world and the Galileo spacecraft. A team led by SwRI found X-ray emissions related to impact from Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, followed by apparent separations from the effects for several months.
“Effects from asteroids and comets can have a major impact on the planet’s stratospheric chemistry – 15 years after the impact, the comet Shoemaker Levy 9 was still responsible for 95% of the stratospheric water on Jupiter,” said Giles. Monitoring impacts and estimating overall impact levels is an important element in understanding the planet ‘s balance. “
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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages Juno’s mission for the principal investigator, Dr. Scott J. Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is administered at NASA’s Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the group’s Science Mission Steering Group in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space built the spacecraft in Denver.
The new paper “Bolide detection in Jupiter atmosphere by Juno UVS” can be found at the American Geophysical Union.
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