APOD: Jupiter Cloud Animation from Juno (2018 May 21)

[APOD Robot]

Jupiter Cloud Animation from Juno

Explanation: How do Jupiter's clouds move? To help find out, images taken with NASA's Juno spacecraft during its last pass near Jupiter have been analyzed and digitally extrapolated into a time-lapse video. The eight-second time-lapse video, digitally extrapolated between two images taken only nine minutes apart, estimates how Jupiter's clouds move over 29 hours. Abstractly, the result appears something like a psychedelic paisley dream. Scientifically, however, the computer animation shows that circular storms tend to swirl, while bands and zones appear to flow. This overall motion is not surprising and has been seen on time-lapse videos of Jupiter before, although never in this detail. The featured region spans about four times the area of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Results from Juno are showing, unexpectedly, that Jupiter's weather phenomena can extend deep below its cloud tops.

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[orin stepanek]

Very interesting!

[TurboMax78]

Its the largest Lava Lamp ever seen!

[BobStein-VisiBone]

The original animation:

(Click to enlarge)

From the 2-frame animation at europlanet plus a little translation, stretch, and rotate. But no further funny business.

[thayer]

I think you mean that you "interpolated" the movement of the clouds between the images, not extrapolated which would be to go beyond or before the images in time.

[Chris Peterson]

I think you mean that you "interpolated" the movement of the clouds between the images, not extrapolated which would be to go beyond or before the images in time.

Actually, it is an extrapolation, projected both backwards and forwards from the two frames used to derive the motion vector field. If you want some gruesome detail into the underlying math, you can check out Gerald's talk on the subject.

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

I think you mean that you "interpolated" the movement of the clouds between the images, not extrapolated which would be to go beyond or before the images in time.

Actually, it is an extrapolation, projected both backwards and forwards from the two frames used to derive the motion vector field. If you want some gruesome detail into the underlying math, you can check out Gerald's talk on the subject.

[Salty V]

Looks like the Seether is loose!

[wwwassmann@gmail.com]

Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity. Lewis Fry Richardson 1922.

[neufer]

R. A. Treumann, Wolfgang Baumjohann & Yasuhito Narita

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Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity.
Lewis Fry Richardson 1922.

Which led to Kolmogorov's 3D classical −5/3 inertial turbulence spectrum as horizontal whorls stretched out vertical whorls causing them to both spin up and shrink in size.

However, for the quasi-2D turbulence in today's APOD there are few horizontal whorls to stretched out vertical whorls (causing them to both spin up and shrink in size), thereby resulting in an energy spectrum that falls off at a faster (re-connection/dissipation) -3 power law.

Kolmogorov −5/3 inertial turbulence spectrum

<<It can be shown that when the turbulent energy spectrum follows a power law
.

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with 1 < p < 3, the second order structure function has also a power law, with the form
.

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Since the experimental values obtained for the second order structure function only deviate slightly from the 2/3 value predicted by Kolmogorov theory, the value for p is very near to 5/3 (differences are about 2%). Thus the "Kolmogorov −5/3 spectrum" is generally observed in turbulence. However, for high order structure functions the difference with the Kolmogorov scaling is significant, and the breakdown of the statistical self-similarity is clear. This behavior are related with the phenomenon of intermittency in turbulence. This is an important area of research in this field, and a major goal of the modern theory of turbulence is to understand what is really universal in the inertial range.>>

[MarkBour]

I love this animation. Beautiful. And though the wind speeds are probably frighteningly high, at this distance it looks almost soothing. It looks a lot like the movement of an amoeba, to me. I wonder what a "Jovistationary" satellite might be able to film. Works out to about 160,000 km altitude radius, I think. I guess you might want some magnification options? (Oops, I neglected to turn the radius into altitude. Jupiter's radius is so large, this is really only an altitude of about 90,000 km from the cloud tops. Still kind of distant, but maybe the interesting features come in fine without magnification.)

[neufer]

I love this animation. Beautiful. And though the wind speeds are probably frighteningly high, at this distance it looks almost soothing. It looks a lot like the movement of an amoeba, to me. I wonder what a "Jovistationary" satellite might be able to film. Works out to about 160,000 km altitude radius, I think. I guess you might want some magnification options? (Oops, I neglected to turn the radius into altitude. Jupiter's radius is so large, this is really only an altitude of about 90,000 km from the cloud tops. Still kind of distant, but maybe the interesting features come in fine without magnification.)

• Fly me to the moon
  Let me play among the stars
  Let me see what spring is like
  On Jupiter and Mars

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Jupiter has a faint planetary ring system composed of three main segments: an inner torus of particles known as the halo, a relatively bright main ring, and an outer gossamer ring. These rings appear to be made of dust, rather than ice as with Saturn's rings. The main ring is probably made of material ejected from the satellites Adrastea and Metis. Material that would normally fall back to the moon is pulled into Jupiter because of its strong gravitational influence. The orbit of the material veers towards Jupiter and new material is added by additional impacts. In a similar way, the moons Thebe and Amalthea probably produce the two distinct components of the dusty gossamer ring. There is also evidence of a rocky ring strung along Amalthea's orbit which may consist of collisional debris from that moon.>>

[Jim Leff]

The YouTube video linked to "results from Juno" shouldn't be missed. It's a particularly insightful 90 minute talk by Juno project scientist Steve Levin and it's way less dry than you might imagine, almost entirely devoted to the mission's most surprising results.