Gravitational signature of Jupiter's internal dynamics
Abstract
Telescopic observations and space missions to Jupiter have provided vast information about Jupiter's cloud level winds, but the depth to which these winds penetrate has remained an ongoing mystery. Scheduled to be launched in 2011, the Jupiter orbiter Juno will make high-resolution observations of Jupiter's gravity field. In this paper we show that these measurements are sensitive to the depth of the internal winds. We use dynamical models ranging from an idealized thermal wind balance analysis, using the observed cloud-top winds, to a full general circulation model (GCM). We relate the depth of the dynamics to the external gravity spectrum for different internal wind structure scenarios. In particular, we predict that substantial Jovian winds below a depth of 500 km would lead to detectable (milligal-level) gravity anomalies with respect to the expected gravity for a planet in solid body rotation.
Additional Information
© 2010 American Geophysical Union. Received 19 October 2009; revised 19 November 2009; accepted 7 December 2009; published 15 January 2010. We thank Andrew Ingersoll, Tapio Schneider, David Stevenson, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. This research has been supported by NSF grant AST-0708106 (Y.K., A.S. and G.F), NASA grant NNX07AF35G (A.S.), the NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship administered by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. (Y.K.) and the Juno project (W.H.).Attached Files
Published - Kaspi2010p7042Geophys_Res_Lett.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 17474
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20100212-160038849
- AST-0708106
- NSF
- NNX07AF35G
- NASA
- University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
- Juno project
- Created
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2010-02-16Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field