Hey, this is Dr. Thomas Z with Science in Seconds.
And we're celebrating an anniversary today.
It's the 9th anniversary of the launch of Juno.
And with me here to talk about not only Juno, but three new publications that just came
out are Scott Bolton, the PI of Juno at Southwest and Heidi Becker at JPL who is the lead of
the Radiation Monitoring Group.
Scott, what's new?
So, we got three new papers coming out and they deal with the topics of lightning.
We've found some lightning really high up, much higher than we expected.
And we've also developed a theory that shows that hail is pretty common from violent thunder
storms at Jupiter.
And it's carrying ammonia and water down deep into the atmosphere.
And these are really exciting results because most of the weather and meteorology on Jupiter
is driven by ammonia and water and on Earth, it's all driven by water.
But on Jupiter, it's a little bit different, ammonia starts playing a really important
role.
So Heidi, talk to us about these hail balls.
Talk to us about how we should imagine them?
Well, they are very large, they are at least as large as a softball, maybe quite a bit
larger than that.
And, on the inside, they are made from a pretty unusual ammonia water solution, that is kind
of like a Windex snowcone.
If you can imagine that.
Covered in a hard, water ice crust that gets thicker and thicker and thicker the longer
it's tumbled in the atmosphere by Jupiter's violent storms, until they get so heavy that
they fall deep into the atmosphere and carry the ammonia down deep.
So Scott, one of the most amazing views of course are these images that so many of our
citizen scientists worked on, just these beautiful highly structured atmosphere of this planet.
And I'd like to understand, is this structure kind of further in, or on the inside is it
more like, you know, uniform?
How should I think about these kind of weather observations you've made here?
So, that's one of Juno's discoveries is that we're seeing that this stuff goes down pretty
deep.
You know, before Juno, we thought that all those beautiful clouds and zones and belts,
and the winds on Juno, uh on Jupiter, were just skin deep.
But in fact, they go down quite deep.
And so what you're seeing at the top cloud layer is really the very top part of a storm
that has really deep roots and is violent thunderstorms with lightning and strong winds.
That's amazing!
So Heidi, how did you actually discover this?
What are the instruments you used for this?
Well, we actually used our engineering star camera to do this.
It's there to help us navigate Juno, and tell us where we are pointing when we take our
data.
But it is incredibly sensitive, it can see very dim things, and because Juno flies so
close to the cloud tops, we were able to see lightning flashes that were much smaller than
any prior mission had ever been able to see.
So Heidi, what is the most exciting part of this discovery for you personally?
Well for me personally, it's the realization that lightning on Jupiter isn't happening
the same way it happens on Earth.
That's what everybody thought looking at images from back to Voyager 1, everybody thought
it's made in the deep water cloud, where thunderstorms likely are on Earth.
But these altitudes where we're seeing them happening, these small lightning flashes,
it's happening where you can't have liquid water.
But there's something special in Jupiter, which is ammonia and that acts as an antifreeze
that allows water ice to melt at those high altitudes and create the conditions for lightning.
So it's very exotic and very different than what we have here on Earth.
And that's what's most exciting to me.
Scott, Heidi, this is just an amazing discovery and I just want to congratulate both you and
the entire team for this amazing work during the last 9 years and also for the years to
come.
As we observe the amazing hurricane on the east coast that just went over our house here,
of course it's just amazing to think that out there, in the solitude of space where
Juno makes observations, there is violent weather of type that we've never observed
here, and that's exactly why we do these amazing missions, is to learn about nature itself
in other places.
So thanks to you and congrats.